Unsettling Race and Language Toward A Raciolinguis

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Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic

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Language in Society 46, 621–647.
doi:10.1017/S0047404517000562
Unsettling race and language: Toward a

raciolinguistic perspective
a
JONATHAN ROSA AND NELSON FLORESb
a
Stanford University, USA
b
University of Pennsylvania, USA
ABSTRACT
This article presents what we term a raciolinguistic perspective, which theo-

rizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race.
Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying
race and language, we seek to understand how and why these categories have
been co-naturalized, and to imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader
structural project of contesting white supremacy. We explore five key compo-
nents of a raciolinguistic perspective: (i) historical and contemporary colonial
co-naturalizations of race and language; (ii) perceptions of racial and linguis-
tic difference; (iii) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (iv)
racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (v) contestations of
racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect our investment in
developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic in-
equality on the one hand, and our commitment to the imagination and crea-
tion of more just societies on the other. (Race, language ideologies,
colonialism, governmentality, enregisterment, structural inequality)*
INTRODUCTION
In US-based sociolinguistics and beyond there is a longstanding history of chal-

lenging deficit views of linguistic and cultural practices associated with racialized
and socioeconomically marginalized populations. Proponents of deficit views once
framed these populations as suffering from ‘verbal deprivation’ (Bereiter & Engel-
mann 1966) and a ‘culture of poverty’ (Lewis 1959) that allegedly resulted in low
educational achievement and related societal problems. In opposition to such per-
spectives, sociolinguists have demonstrated the systematicity of racialized language
practices and the linguistic dexterity that characterizes the communities in which
they are used. This includes research seeking to legitimize so-called nonstandard
language varieties such as Spanglish (Poplack 1980) and African American
English (Labov 1972), as well as studies focused on documenting and revitalizing
heritage language practices associated with various indigenous and (im)migrant
groups as part of broader efforts to promote bilingualism (Fishman 1991). Yet,
despite decades of sociolinguistic research debunking deficit perspectives and
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J O N AT H A N RO S A A N D N E L S O N F LO R E S
challenging racializing discourses (Urciuoli 1996; Hill 1998; Dick & Wirtz 2011),
they remain as pervasive as ever, as illustrated by recent claims about the supposed
thirty million ‘word gap’ between predominantly middle-class white communities
and low-income communities of color in the US (Hart & Risley 1995; Suskind
2015).
In this article we connect critical-language research with critical-race scholar-
ship in order to develop a more robust understanding of the historical and structural
processes that organize the modes of stigmatization in which deficit perspectives are
rooted. This focus on historical and structural processes requires us to shift from
privileging individual interactions and speaking practices as the primary sites in
which categories of race and language are created and negotiated, toward investigat-
ing how institutionalized hierarchies of racial and linguistic legitimacy are central to
processes of modern subject formation. Since the project of modernity is premised
on the stigmatization of racialized subjects across nation-state and colonial contexts,
efforts to legitimize racially stigmatized linguistic practices are fundamentally
limited in their capacity to unsettle the inequities that they seek to disrupt.
Indeed, as Toni Morrison pointed out more than forty years ago:1
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It
keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no lan-
guage, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped prop-
erly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art, so you dredge
that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary.
There will always be one more thing.
Taking our cue from Morrison, we seek to theorize a raciolinguistic perspective,

which interrogates the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language
and race. We explore the analytical and practical implications of the co-naturaliza-
tion of language and race across differing nation-state and colonial contexts, linking
the analysis of race and language in the US to a transnational frame in which the
modern world is profoundly shaped by the globalization of European colonialism.
Central to our raciolinguistic perspective is an analysis of the continued rearticula-
tion of colonial distinctions between Europeanness and non-Europeanness—and,
by extension, whiteness and nonwhiteness. These distinctions anchor the joint in-
stitutional (re)production of categories of race and language, as well as perceptions
and experiences thereof. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for
parsing and classifying race and language, we seek to understand how and why
these categories have been co-naturalized in particular societal contexts, and to
imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting
white supremacy on a global scale. Refusing to restrict a careful consideration of
race to the analysis of language within the US and other nation-states built on
settler colonialism and chattel slavery, which are often recognized as racialized so-
cieties, we suggest that raciolinguistic patterns and particularities must be appre-
hended across the modern world. Thus, while many of the examples and
analyses throughout this article position the US as a point of entry, we seek to
622 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)
T O WA R D A R A C I O L I N G U I S T I C P E R S P E C T I V E
enter into a broader dialogue with scholars whose work is situated in various nation-
state contexts to examine local and global implications of the co-naturalization of
language and race.
Building from our previous work on raciolinguistic ideologies, which explores
how the linguistic practices of racialized populations are systematically stigmatized
regardless of the extent to which these practices might seem to correspond to stan-
dardized norms (Flores & Rosa 2015), this article proposes five key components of
what we term a raciolinguistic perspective: (i) historical and contemporary co-nat-
uralizations of race and language as part of the colonial formation of modernity; (ii)
perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (iii) regimentations of racial and lin-
guistic categories; (iv) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (v)
the contestation of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect our in-
vestment in developing a careful theorization of relationships between racial and
linguistic structures on the one hand, and our commitment to the imagination
and creation of more just societies on the other.
HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY CO-

NATURALIZATIONS OF RACE AND LANGUAGE
AS PART OF THE COLONIAL FORMATION OF
MODERNITY
Contemporary raciolinguistic ideologies must be situated within colonial histories

that have shaped the co-naturalization of language and race as part of the project of
modernity. Two central components of the European colonial formation of moder-
nity were the construction and naturalization of the concept of race along with the
construction and naturalization of languages as bounded and separate objects asso-
ciated with particular racial groups. The construction of race was an integral element
of the European national and colonial project that discursively produced racial
Others in opposition to the superior European bourgeois subject (Stoler 1995).
This positioning of Europeanness as superior to non-Europeanness was part of a
broader process of national-state/colonial governmentality (Flores 2013), a form
of governmental racialization that imposed European epistemological and institu-
tional authority on colonized populations worldwide as a justification for European
colonialism (Hesse 2007). In conjunction with the production of race, nation-state/
colonial governmentality imposed ideologies of separate and bounded languages
on colonized populations (Makoni & Pennycook 2007). As with race, the creation
of language hierarchies positioned European languages as superior to non-Europe-
an languages (Veronelli 2015). A raciolinguistic perspective seeks to understand
the interplay of language and race within the historical production of nation-state/
colonial governmentality, and the ways that colonial distinctions within and
between nation-state borders continue to shape contemporary linguistic and
racial formations.
Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 623
In the early period of the colonization of what Europeans would come to call the
Americas, raciolinguistic ideologies were used to position indigenous populations
as subhuman. Veronelli (2015) shows how European colonizers described indige-
nous language practices as animal-like forms of ‘simple communication’ that were
incapable of expressing the complex worldviews represented by European languag-
es. In related work, Greenblatt (1990) explores the ways early European colonizers
characterized indigenous languages as incapable of expressing Christian doctrine
and questioned whether these communities were sufficiently human to receive
Christian teaching. He notes, ‘the real test of their conversion to civilization
would be whether they had been able to master a language that “men” could under-
stand’ (1990:18). In short, from the onset of European colonization, indigenous
populations were stripped of their humanity at least in part through representations
of their languages in animalistic terms that suggested they were incapable of ex-
pressing ideas that European colonizers thought were integral to becoming a full
human being. This positioning of indigenous populations as linguistically subhu-
man is part of the origin of longstanding, racialized ideologies of languagelessness
(Rosa 2016a) that position colonized subjects as incapable of communicating legit-
imately in any language.
The framing of indigenous populations as subhuman began to conflict with En-
lightenment ideas related to equality and freedom that emerged in concert with the
rise of European nation-states (Lowe 2006) and morphed into the framing of colo-
nized subjects as less evolved humans than Europeans (Mignolo 2000). Important-
ly, these conceptions of freedom hinged on racialized distinctions between
European and non-European subjects, such that racialized populations could be le-
gitimately enslaved, abjected, and annihilated based on epistemologies that restrict-
ed political rights to normative European subjects. Raciolinguistic ideologies
played an integral role in the epistemological shift from positioning non-European
populations as subhumans rather than less evolved humans. Whereas in the early
years of European colonization indigenous languages, in contexts such as the
Americas and Africa, were described in animalistic terms as a way of denying in-
digenous populations their humanity, this reconfigured colonial epistemology
sorted both European and non-European populations into separate and bounded
communities with their own unique worldviews and Europeans atop the evolution-
ary scale of human development (Makoni & Pennycook 2007).
Language was seen as key to distinguishing between and potentially eradicating
these differences in worldviews. On one side of the debate, were proponents of the
maintenance of indigenous languages based on differing rationales. Christian mis-
sionaries and other colonial agents saw advantages to using indigenous languages
to impose a Eurocentric epistemology on indigenous populations (Bamgbose 1983;
Pennycook 2002). These epistemologies informed the creation of dictionaries,
grammars, and writing systems for indigenous languages as part of colonial dom-
ination, in some cases prompting colonized subjects to contest these practices
through various acts of resistance and rebellion (Hanks 2010). Other European
colonial advocates for indigenous communities depicted indigenous populations as

‘noble savages’ whose worldviews should be protected from European influences
(Derrida 1974). This protection of indigenous worldviews was attempted in part
through efforts by European colonizers to name and codify indigenous languages
as bounded and separate objects in the hopes that this would facilitate the preserva-
tion of indigenous cultures and human history more broadly (Pennycook 2002).
Though ostensibly focused on preserving indigenous cultures, these efforts in-
volved the imposition of colonial views of cultural difference on indigenous
populations.
On the other side of the debate were European colonial agents who saw no role
for indigenous languages in European colonial projects. Proponents of this perspec-
tive equated indigenous languages with primitive worldviews that should not be
preserved but rather eliminated through the imposition of European languages on
these populations (Mignolo 1995). From this perspective, colonized people
could further evolve in their humanity only by mastering a European language.
Yet, as Fanon (1967) suggests, colonized populations’ subordinate positions
prevent them from accessing the forms of legitimacy associated with mastery of Eu-
ropean languages. In particular, he describes the ways that, in the context of French
Caribbean colonialism, white French speakers often engaged Black French speak-
ers as if they were children and refused to recognize them as legitimate French
speakers with the same intellectual capacity as white people. Vigoroux (2017) ex-
plores how stigmatizing stereotypes about Black populations circulate not only in
French colonial and postcolonial societies, but also in the European metropole.
Specifically, Vigoroux investigates the stereotypical framing of ‘Africans as inca-
pable of speaking French’ within France. Relatedly, Morgan’s (2002:10) African
American research participants invoke fraught histories of enslavement and poste-
mancipation in which ‘you could get into trouble for speaking like a grown man or
woman’. This underscores relations among colonial histories and racialized lan-
guage ideologies that link and in some cases imbricate anti-indigenous and anti-
Black perspectives. Even when colonized subjects complied with the imposition
of European languages, they continued to be positioned as racial Others who
would never be fully European—and, by extension, fully human.
These raciolinguistic ideologies have undergone another transformation in the
postcolonial era. This transformation is reflected in part by discourses of endanger-
ment that ecologize indigenous languages by positioning them as repositories of
exotic worldviews that should be preserved as a way of maintaining humanity’s
connection with its history (Cameron 2007). An alternative ecologization of lan-
guage positions European languages as modern conduits of science and technology
and indigenous languages as antimodern communicative forms that hinder national
development (Marr 2011). In a continuation of raciolinguistic ideologies of Euro-
pean colonialism, these differing ecologizations of language suggest that indige-
nous communities must be excluded from contemporary nation-states in order to
maintain their unique worldviews or must replace their heritage language with a
European language in order to become modern citizen-subjects of contemporary

nation-states. Such racialized chronotopes—space-time narratives linking particu-
lar models of personhood and language practices to particular temporal and geo-
graphical contexts—are powerful articulations of raciolinguistic ideologies
(Wirtz 2014; Rosa 2016b).
These historical and contemporary linkages underscore the importance of inter-
rogating the role of language and race in the reconfiguration of colonial distinctions
in purportedly postcolonial, postracial, and postapartheid settings (Alim & Reyes
2011; Williams & Stroud 2015). Rafael (2000) analyzes historical and contempo-
rary conceptions of racial and linguistic mixing in the Philippines, a site of Spanish
and US colonialism, and the contested perspectives from which this mixing is
framed as a sign of superiority or inferiority. Reyes (2017) ties this colonial
history to the emergence of the postcolonial category of the Philippine conyo, a
fraught urban-elite youth figure stereotyped as light-skinned, superficial, and mate-
rialistic, and associated with English-Tagalog (i.e. ‘Taglish’ or ‘Englog’) language
mixing. Building on Bhabha’s (1984) theorization of colonial mimicry, Reyes
(2017) examines how efforts to discern ‘real’ vs. ‘fake’ conyos reflect the ways
that postcolonial societies are continually structured by anxieties about postcolonial
subjects’ efforts to copy or imitate practices associated with colonizers. The key
point is that distinctions between ‘pure’ versus ‘mixed’ Filipinoness, Spanishness,
and Americanness on the one hand, and Tagalog, Spanish, and English on the other,
are historical and colonial productions rather than objective racial and linguistic
classifications—in short, they are raciolinguistic ideologies. Thus, a raciolinguistic
perspective illuminates the importance of conceptualizing contemporary debates
about racial and linguistic authenticity in relation to colonial logics through
which boundaries delimiting categories of race and language are co-naturalized
in shifting ways as part of broader power formations.
In addition to the rearticulation of colonial discourses in postcolonial relations,
raciolinguistic ideologies shape the experiences of diasporic populations across so-
cietal contexts (Kubota 2014; Motha 2014; Ndhlovu 2014). An example is the stig-
matization of US Latinxs’2 English and Spanish use, which must be understood in
relation to longstanding experiences of internal colonialism involving the remap-
ping of transnational colonial relations within a colonizing or previously colonized
nation-state’s borders (Del Valle 2006; Capetillo-Ponce 2007). As a result of both
Spanish and US colonialism, many US Latinxs are confronted with reified national,
linguistic, and ethnoracial borders between Latin America, which is often stereo-
typed as brown and Spanish-speaking, and the US, which is often stereotyped as
white and English-speaking. In addition to erasing intersections among Latinx, in-
digenous, and Black populations and their language practices, as well as other ra-
cialized populations and their modes of communication, these raciolinguistic
ideologies frame US Latinxs’ English-Spanish bilingualism as deficient. In partic-
ular, US Latinxs are often depicted as lacking full proficiency in either English or
Spanish and in need of linguistic remediation to provide them with access to the
so-called ‘academic language’ required for complex thinking processes and suc-
cessful engagement in the global economy (Flores 2016). While these raciolinguis-
tic ideologies differ in some ways from those used to represent languages and
populations in conventionally defined colonial and postcolonial contexts, these
various settings are characterized by the ideological assumption that racialized sub-
jects’ language practices are unfit for legitimate participation in a modern world.
In summary, nation-state/colonial governmentality relied on raciolinguistic ide-
ologies that positioned colonized populations as inferior to idealized European pop-
ulations. In the early period of European colonialism of the Americas, these
raciolinguistic ideologies positioned indigenous American and enslaved African
populations as subhuman. Gradually, as European Enlightenment epistemologies
challenged these ideologies, colonized populations in the Americas and other Eu-
ropean colonial contexts were repositioned as lower on the evolutionary scale—less
human rather than subhuman—in relation to Europeans. This ascribed evolutionary
inferiority was reflected in the management of the languages of colonized people,
which stipulated mastery of European languages as a requirement for the evolution
of colonized populations. Even in cases where European colonizers promoted the
use of indigenous languages, this was often in the service of furthering colonial
domination through the indoctrination of Eurocentric epistemologies or through
efforts to preserve the lifestyle of ‘noble savages’. The raciolinguistic ideologies
that organized these colonial relations continue to shape the world order in the post-
colonial era by framing racialized subjects’ language practices as inadequate for the
complex thinking processes needed to navigate the global economy, as well as the
targets of anxieties about authenticity and purity. Contemporary raciolinguistic ide-
ologies must be understood within this broader history of European colonialism.
Indeed, contemporary raciolinguistic ideologies are an ongoing rearticulation of
the processes of racialization at the core of nation-state/colonial governmentality.
These historical and contemporary modes of governance are also a precondition
for the hegemonic perceptions that we explore in the next section.
PERCEPTIONS OF RACIAL AND LINGUISTIC

DIFFERENCE
To the extent that colonial histories shape and often overdetermine interpretations
of racialized subjects’ language practices, it becomes crucial to develop a theory of
racialized language perception. This section attempts to do so by building upon
three key insights: (i) we draw on Inoue’s (2003a,b; 2006) analysis of the role of
the masculine ‘listening subject’ in the production of the sociolinguistic category
of Japanese ‘women’s language’ by redirecting analytical attention from the com-
municative practices of racialized speaking subjects to the hearing practices of
white listening subjects; (ii) we elaborate on our previous theorization of the
white listening subject (Flores & Rosa 2015) by framing a discussion of racially
hegemonic perceiving subjects more broadly that are oriented to spoken language
as well as other modes of communication and semiotic forms; and (iii) we empha-
size that racially hegemonic perceptions can be enacted not simply by individuals
but also nonhuman entities such as institutions, policies, and technologies associ-
ated with linguistic profiling (Baugh 2003), and not simply by white individuals but
rather by whiteness as an historical and contemporary subject position that can be
situationally inhabited both by individuals recognized as white and nonwhite
(Haney-Lopez 1996). These insights inform our conception of the reproduction
of raciolinguistic ideologies through racially hegemonic modes of perception that
shape how racialized subjects’ language practices are construed and valued.
This section is largely inspired by Inoue’s notion of the listening subject
(2003a), her analysis of gender, class, racial, and linguistic ideologies (2003b),
and her broader treatment of the ideological category of Japanese ‘women’s lan-
guage’ as a form of ‘indexical inversion’ (2006). Whereas many sociolinguistic
analyses approach Japanese women’s language as an empirically observable and
objectively quantifiable linguistic category, Inoue redirects attention to the ways
in which anxieties surrounding women and their expressive practices, in the histor-
ical context of Japan’s political and economic modernization, produced masculine
‘listening subjects’ who overheard schoolgirls’ speech as a problem in need of
careful management. Thus, for Inoue, it is crucial to attend to the ways that
‘noise and language are neither naturally pregiven nor phenomenogically imma-
nent’ (2003a:157), and how language ideologies can produce the very linguistic
forms that they purportedly document. From this perspective, Japanese women’s
language can be understood as a ‘compelling copy which needs no original for
its effectivity’ (2003b:325). For Inoue, this illustrates how the analysis of Japanese
women’s language requires a theory of indexical inversion. Rather than the
common analytical use of indexicality to understand how linguistic signs index
social categories, indexical inversion considers how language ideologies associated
with social categories produce the perception of linguistic signs. We suggest that
raciolinguistic ideologies function in similar ways by producing racialized language
practices that are perceived as emanating from racialized subjects.
Our raciolinguistic approach draws from Inoue’s work by refusing to center the
analysis on attempts to document the empirical linguistic practices of racialized
subjects, and instead interrogating the interpretive and categorizing practices of
racially hegemonic perceiving subjects. In previous work (Flores & Rosa 2015)
we explored how US educational classifications such as long-term English
learner, heritage language learner, and standard English learner, which are often as-
sociated with distinct racialized populations and analyzed separately, function in
similarly stigmatizing ways by positioning racialized speaking subjects as
deviant and inferior from the perspective of white listening subjects. We showed
how these racialized subjects are perpetually perceived as linguistically deficient
even when engaging in language practices that would likely be legitimized or
even prized were they produced by white speaking subjects. The celebration of
the Spanish-English bilingualism of 2016 US Democratic vice presidential
candidate Tim Kaine, a white man, juxtaposed with the purportedly faulty bilin-
gualism of potential vice presidential candidate Julian Castro, a Latino man, is
one example of this dynamic. US Latinxs can achieve the highest levels of educa-
tion, drawing on a range of multilingual practices to navigate various interactions in
ostensibly effective ways, and yet still face the stigmatization of their Spanish and
English abilities. Rosa (2016a:162) shows how many self-identified monolingual
white teachers in a Chicago high school viewed their bilingual Puerto Rican prin-
cipal, who held a doctorate in education, as intellectually and linguistically inferior,
with one teacher suggesting that the principal’s “English is horrible, and from what
I hear, her Spanish isn’t that good either”. Collins (2017:49) explores similar issues of
race, stigmatizing school-based language perceptions, and the rearticulation of white
supremacy in the South African context, showing how particular racialized popula-
tions’ self-identified English language use is construed as impure based on ‘ideolo-
gies that equate language mixture with defective populations and persons’.
Importantly, the linguistic interpretations of white listening subjects are part of a
broader, racialized semiotics of white perceiving subjects. That is, the overdetermi-
nation of spoken language practices through raciolinguistic ideologies is tied to the
overdetermination of various nonspoken and nonlinguistic signs associated with ra-
cialized subjects, including literacy practices, physical features, bodily comportment,
and sartorial style. Recent cases of US-based, anti-Black racial profiling and extraju-
dicial violence exemplify the interrelationship between white listening subjects’ and
white perceiving subjects’ overdetermination of signs. In 2014, when Darren Wilson,
a white police officer, killed Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager,
in Ferguson, Missouri, Wilson suggested that Brown’s stature was monstrous and
threatening despite the fact that he and Brown were the same height and he was
the only one armed with a deadly weapon in their altercation (Bonilla & Rosa
2015). Similarly, in 2012, when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin,
another unarmed African American teenager, in Sanford, Florida, Zimmerman pur-
portedly perceived the candy and soft drink Martin was carrying as potentially dan-
gerous weapons. When political commentators such as Geraldo Rivera suggested that
Martin’s hooded sweatshirt was ‘thug’ wear, others noted the racial double-standards
at work in interpretations of this allegedly threatening apparel, which is in fact a nor-
mative youth style of dress throughout the US. In these examples, George Zimmer-
man and Geraldo Rivera, who are both recognized from many perspectives as
nonwhite Latinos, enacted anti-Black ideologies of white perceiving subjects
through structural positions of authority that they inhabited as part of a neighborhood
watch group and a celebrity media personality, respectively (Hodges 2015). This
demonstrates the ways in which whiteness functions as a structural position that
can be inhabited by whites and nonwhites alike depending on the circumstances. It
also highlights that we must situate white listening subjects within a broader exami-
nation of white perceiving subjects that targets both linguistic signs and broader se-
miotic forms.
Whiteness is also animated through nonhuman entities such as technologies and

institutions infused with raciolinguistic ideologies that endow them with the capac-
ity to act as perceiving subjects. These include voice-recognition technologies that
often privilege languages, varieties, and pronunciation patterns associated with nor-
mative whiteness. For example, as part of the stigmatizing effort to close the pur-
ported thirty million ‘word gap’ that allegedly plagues low-income children in
the US (the majority of whom, at least in the related experiments, are children of
color), a counting device is used to track the number of words spoken to children
by caregivers in target households. These data are then used to prescribe interven-
tions in the ways that low-income, predominantly families of color socialize their
children. While linguistic anthropologists and applied linguists have offered a
range of critiques of the problematic linguistic, racial, and class ideologies that
inform this research (Avineri et al. 2015; Aggarwal 2016), it is important to note
how language-gap interventions involve nonhuman technologies that function as
perceiving subjects that measure deficiency in racially and socioeconomically mar-
ginalized households. In addition to digital technologies, nonhuman actors, includ-
ing assessments and policies, can function as powerful perceiving subjects that
profoundly shape racialized populations’ experiences across contexts. Seemingly
objective procedures for testing and classifying language become powerful actors
and institutional gatekeepers. Linguistic classifications and procedures can
exclude racialized populations from access to opportunities and resources related
to education (Flores, Kleyn, & Menken 2015), employment (Zentella 2014),
legal representation (Haviland 2003), asylum (Blommaert 2009), citizenship (Ram-
anathan 2013), and migration (Dick 2011). In the context of contemporary global
debates surrounding migration rights, it is particularly important to consider how
technologies of surveillance and institutional procedures perceive racialized popu-
lations and practices as matter out of place.
Careful examination of the actions and consequences of human and nonhuman
perceiving subjects is an elaboration on our conceptualization of the white listening
subject, which is a crucial component of raciolinguistic ideologies. This analysis
redirects attention from racialized populations’ linguistic practices to hegemoni-
cally positioned modes of perception through which these practices are apprehend-
ed. The interpretations of white listening subjects are part of a broader set of
hegemonic perceptions that apprehend and often overdetermine not only linguistic
signs, but also a wider range of semiotic forms. The following section builds on this
wider semiotic view of a raciolinguistic perspective to consider how forms of lan-
guage and race are regimented into recognizable categories.
REGIMENTATIONS OF RACIAL AND

LINGUISTIC CATEGORIES
Many scholars have sought to interrogate the reified nature of named languages/va-
rieties and racial categories, and to understand the logics through which named
languages/varieties and racial categories are continually reproduced. Analyses of

linguistic reification include efforts toward ‘disinventing and reconstituting lan-
guage’ (Makoni & Pennycook 2007), examinations of linguistic borders and ideol-
ogies of differentiation (Urciuoli 1995; Irvine & Gal 2000), and poststructuralist
orientations to language more broadly (García, Flores, & Spotti 2017); examina-
tions of racial reification include efforts to denaturalize race as a social construct
(Haney-Lopez 1994), understand race as a ‘biosocial fact’ (Hartigan 2013), and in-
terrogate historical and contemporary projects of racial formation and naturalization
(Omi & Winant 1994; Shankar 2013). A raciolinguistic perspective seeks to synthe-
size these approaches by framing the co-naturalization of language and race as a
process of raciolinguistic enregisterment, whereby linguistic and racial forms are
jointly constructed as sets and rendered mutually recognizable as named languag-
es/varieties and racial categories. Linguistic enregisterment has been conceptual-
ized as the process whereby forms of language are endowed with cultural value
as coherent sets (Agha 2005). Processes of linguistic register formation derive co-
herence from ideologies of speaking and listening subjects that construe language
forms in relation to models of personhood and vice versa. The concept of enregister-
ment makes it possible to analyze dynamic patterns in linguistic form, as well as
social personae associated with those forms. By denaturalizing boundaries that dis-
tinguish between languages and varieties thereof, enregisterment provides an over-
arching framework with which to investigate relations among prevailing
sociolinguistic concepts that are often approached as distinct phenomena, such as
codeswitching, styleshifting, voicing, and footing.
As Collins (2017:54) notes, a careful consideration of race is ‘a necessary en-
gagement for register analysis, given the demonstrable ability of such analysis to
integrate language variation, cultural categorization, and sociohistorical process’.
Building from this insight, the notion of raciolinguistic enregisterment extends pre-
vious approaches to the analysis of register formations (Irvine 1990; Silverstein
2003; Agha 2005) by analyzing processes whereby signs of race and language
are naturalized as discrete, recognizable sets. Rosa (2018) analyzes one such
process of raciolinguistic enregisterment through which people come to look like
a language and sound like a race. By tracing the ideological twinning of particular
linguistic forms and racial categories, raciolinguistic enregisterment can be under-
stood as the crucial condition of possibility for what come to be perceived as com-
paratively stable or malleable racial and linguistic categories and practices (Alim
2016; Roth-Gordon 2016). Rather than subjecting such perceptions to careful scru-
tiny, scholars have too often relied on ‘distinctiveness’ approaches to the study of
race and language, in which racial categories are equated with empirically distinc-
tive sets of linguistic features, simultaneously marginalizing the language-based
study of racial groups that are not thought to possess such distinctive sets and reify-
ing the boundaries demarcating other racial groups and their purported linguistic
features (Lo & Reyes 2009; Chun & Lo 2016). This reflects a reliance upon a meta-
physics of raciolinguistic presence—a sense that languages, varieties, and racial
groups are empirical ‘things’ in the first place—that is characteristic of how lan-
guage and race are often approached from scholarly and lay perspectives. In con-
trast, by analyzing processes of raciolinguistic enregisterment, it becomes
possible to understand how language and race come to be perceived and experi-
enced in relation to one another.
Similar to Bucholtz & Hall’s (2005) approach to identity and interaction, we are
interested in how processes of raciolinguistic enregisterment emblematize particu-
lar linguistic features as authentic signs of racialized models of personhood. This is
found not only in sociolinguistic accounts of the features that compose categories
such as ‘African American English’ (Green 2002) or ‘Chicano English’ (Fought
2003), but also popular stereotypes and modes of linguistic appropriation such as
‘Mock Spanish’ (Hill 2008), ‘Mock Asian’ (Chun 2004), ‘Hollywood Injun
English’ (Meek 2006), and ‘linguistic minstrelsy’ (Bucholtz & Lopez 2011). In
each of these cases, minute features of language, including grammatical forms, pro-
sodic patterns, and morphological particles, are emblematized as sets of signs that
correspond to racial categories. Crucially, as Meek (2006) demonstrates, these
forms need not correspond to empirically verifiable linguistic practices in order
to undergo racial emblematization. Moreover, as Lo & Reyes (2009) point out,
the imagination of groups such as Asian Americans as lacking a distinctive racial-
ized variety of English analogous to African American English or Chicano English,
must be interrogated based on the racial logics that organize stereotypes about and
societal positions of different racial groups on the one hand, and perceptions of their
language practices on the other. Specifically, Lo & Reyes argue that racial ideolo-
gies constructing Asian Americans as model minorities who approximate white-
ness are linked to language ideologies constructing Asian Americans as lacking a
racially distinctive variety of English. In related work, Chun (2016:81) shows
how emblematized Mock Asian forms such as ‘ching-chong’ are located across
‘the important boundary between ‘Oriental talk’ and English’, which sustains
Asian Americans alternately as model minorities and forever foreigners. Thus,
we must carefully reconsider seemingly ‘distinctive’ and ‘nondistinctive’ language
varieties alike, by analyzing the logics that position particular racial groups and lin-
guistic forms in relation to one another. That is, no language variety is objectively
distinctive or nondistinctive, but rather comes to be enregistered as such in partic-
ular historical, political, and economic circumstances.
The concept of raciolinguistic enregisterment also builds on the work of scholars
who have incorporated an analysis of race into their critiques of language policies,
assessments, and classifications. For example, Bonfiglio (2002, 2010) argues that
categories such as ‘Standard American English’ and ‘native speaker’ must be un-
derstood in relation to racialized perceptions through which racially unmarked sub-
jects’ language practices are positioned as inherently legitimate and racialized
subjects’ practices are perceived as inherently deficient. Similarly, Aneja
(2016:353) suggests that race plays an important role in understanding ‘(non)
native speakering as a theoretical and methodological lens through which the
historical origins and continuous (re)emergence of native and nonnative position-

alities can be understood’. Flores & Rosa (2015) and Rosa (2016a) show how in-
stitutional assessments of and distinctions between ‘academic language/home
language’, ‘proficient language user/language learner/long-term language
learner’, and ‘L1/L2’, are often measures of the capacity to inhabit and enact ide-
alized whiteness rather than empirical linguistic practices. Meanwhile, Urciuoli
(1996), Lippi-Green (1997), and Hill (1998) have demonstrated the racialized
ways in which ideologies of accent systematically stigmatize racialized subjects
even when they are engaging in linguistic practices that would likely be perceived
as legitimate were they produced by white speaking subjects.
These stigmatizing ideologies are reflected in a ‘Standard English learner’ lin-
guistic screener used in US schools, which demonstrates how raciolinguistic enre-
gisterment links linguistic forms and racial categories in institutionally
consequential ways. The linguistic screener, which is used in one of the nation’s
largest public school districts, seeks to identify students who ‘would particularly
benefit from mainstream English language development’. Interestingly, the screen-
er uses seemingly affirming, comparatively asset-based discourses, such as ‘home
language fluency’, to refer to language practices that are understood to diverge from
‘standard’ or ‘mainstream’ English. Despite this apparent affirmation, the emphasis
is still on targeting aberrant practices and teaching racialized students to modify
their behaviors. The screener provides separate lists of ‘African American linguistic
features’, ‘Mexican American linguistic features’, and ‘Hawaiian American lin-
guistic features’. Each list includes approximately twenty sentences that are repre-
sented in ‘Standard English’ and the respective ‘nonstandard’, racialized variety,
highlighting the particular linguistic features that distinguish between the two
varieties.
The screener is administered by reading the ‘Standard English’ sentences aloud,
having students repeat the sentences orally and/or write the sentences, and then
comparing their responses to possible racialized versions. For example, the
African American screening tool highlights copula deletion, a widely enregistered
African American English syntactic feature, in the sentences The cat is in the tree
(Standard English) vs. The cat in the tree (African American English). However,
the screening tool also identifies linguistic differences that are not as widely enreg-
istered as distinctively African American forms. Examples of less widely enregis-
tered forms include the purported problem of vowel pairs/homophones in the
pronunciation of pen (Standard English) as pin (African American English) in
the sentence She uses a pen to write; inflectional ending -ing in the pronunciation
of running (Standard English) as runnin (African American English) in the sen-
tence They are running very fast; and syllable stress patterns in the pronunciation
of the word hotel with stress on the second syllable (Standard English) vs. the
first syllable (African American English) in the sentence She stayed at a hotel. Sim-
ilarly, the Mexican American screening tool highlights less highly enregistered pat-
terns as problems, such as circumflex/sing-song musical intonation in the
pronunciation of bad (Standard English) as baaad (Mexican American English) in

the sentence Don’t be bad. Meanwhile, the Hawaiian American screening tool
targets th- sound in the production of That is not my dog (Standard English) as
Dat dawg no mein (Hawaiian American English). This last example, which purport-
edly focuses on the th- sound in the pronunciation of that as dat, yet also highlights
other syntactic (e.g. is not vs. no) and phonological (e.g. mine /maɪn/ vs. mein
/meɪn/) differences, demonstrates how apparent efforts to identify particular lin-
guistic aberrations can be overdetermined by imagined linguistically inept, racial-
ized models of personhood that map deficiency onto various practices. Such
racialized language features might be valorized or stigmatized depending on the
perspective from which they are construed, but in the context of this normative lin-
guistic screener they are positioned as signs of deficiency and the need for remedi-
ation. While one might be inclined to distinguish between examples within the
screeners that focus on the identification of linguistic differences perceived as
more and less consequential, the crucial point is that the screener is a product of
broader processes of raciolinguistic enregisterment that bundle together ALL of
these purportedly empirical linguistic forms as distinct sets that correspond to dis-
tinct racial categories as a measure of deviation from imagined standards. In this
particular case, enregistered sets become institutionally consequential by overdeter-
mining racialized students as linguistically deficient and in need of remediation.
Instead of beginning by attempting to document the range of linguistic practices
that are distinctive of a given racial group, raciolinguistic enregisterment involves
asking how and why particular linguistic forms are construed as emblems of partic-
ular racial categories and vice versa, in what historical, political, and economic con-
texts, and with what institutional and interpersonal consequences. The following
section builds on this approach by considering the intersectional ways in which
language and race co-articulate with linked axes of social difference (Gal 2012)
to constitute subjectivities that are simultaneously situated in relation to multiple
dimensions of power.
RACIAL AND LINGUISTIC INTERSECTIONS

AND ASSEMBLAGES
Our effort to conceptualize a raciolinguistic approach to the study of language in

society reflects an ongoing concern with the ways that race has often been misun-
derstood or erased within previous work, such as the aforementioned analyses
rooted in ‘distinctiveness’ models that naturalize racial and linguistic categories.
Another significant misunderstanding is the notion that race is an epiphenomenal
social construction or a hyper-politicized, US-centric category that should be
avoided in favor of categories some scholars view as more empirically verifiable
and analytically significant such as ethnicity, class, and gender. Alim & Reyes
(2011) persuasively argue that scholarly and popular postracial viewpoints over-
look the ongoing salience of race, as well as its links to related axes of difference
(Gal 2012). In contrast to racial distinctiveness or disavowal, our proposed raciolin-

guistic approach locates the co-naturalization of race and language in relation to
longstanding histories of colonialism and nation-state formation; thus, the
ongoing, recursive, cross-societal, and cross-institutional significance of the colo-
nial European/non-European distinction makes race a crucial, indeed global, cate-
gory of analysis.
Our centering of the co-naturalization of language and race, however, is not in-
tended to displace, avoid, or distract from important analyses of categories such as
gender, socioeconomic class, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion. Building on a wide
range of incisive, longstanding intersectional analyses forged primarily by women-
of-color feminist scholars focused on matrices of domination, we refuse dichoto-
mies between categories such as race, class, gender, and sexuality (Moraga & An-
zaldúa 1981; Hill Collins 1990; Crenshaw 1991). In concert with intersectional
language-based scholarship, a raciolinguistic persepective can contribute to under-
standings of the ways that categories are intersectionally assembled and communi-
catively co-constituted. Key thinking in this vein includes Morgan’s (2009:xix)
analysis of research on African American language practices, which argues that
Black women have been alternately ‘described as linguistically conservative and
aggressive’. Morgan (2009:xx) shows how these narratives reflect not only the
exclusion of Black women as research subjects, much less as researchers them-
selves, but also the investment in reproducing hegemonic stereotypes that frame
Black women as ‘oversexed, loud, and bitter’. Black women scholars such as
Mitchell-Kernan (1971) and Smitherman (1977) have faced criticism because
they are seen as illegitimate, ‘native’ researchers whose anthropological and
linguistic work cannot be reduced to previous exoticizing, stigmatizing, or roman-
ticizing accounts. Jacobs-Huey (2006:15) stakes a claim to the power of such
‘native’ perspectives in her analysis of African American women’s language social-
ization and hair-care practices, noting the transformative ‘presence of “natives” who
are intently gazing and talking back’ in ways that contest their overdetermination.
Racial and linguistic stereotypes co-articulate with gender normativity in ways
that alternately produce context-specific forms of privilege and precarity. Recall
the example above of the bilingual Latina high school principal in Chicago, who
held a doctorate in education yet still faced accusations of linguistic and intellectual
inferiority. It is crucial to note the specific subject position Latinas inhabit in rela-
tion to perceptions of inferiority, as well as the ways this positionality is reproduced
through hegemonic representations of Latinas as spicy, sexy, and unintelligent
(Mendible 2007). A 2015 CoverGirl cosmetics commercial that circulated widely
in the US—featuring Sofía Vergara, a Latina actress and television host, and
Ellen DeGeneres, a white, openly lesbian comedian and television host—demon-
strates these stereotypes. In the commercial, Vergara and DeGeneres introduce a
new cosmetic product, but Vergara’s ‘accented’ English quickly becomes the
punchline. When Vergara notes that DeGeneres has stolen her lines, DeGeneres re-
sponds, “Well, no one can understand you”. Vergara is framed as linguistically
incompetent while striking a sexy pose, with DeGeneres mocking her purported un-
intelligibility by reproducing it as gibberish. A potential reading of this commercial
is that the nonnormativity of DeGeneres’ queerness, which defies hegemonic fem-
inine beauty standards, is mitigated by the intersection of ideologies surrounding
race, language, gender, and sexuality, which simultaneously position Vergara as
hypersexualized and linguistically incompetent. This resonates with related
research on the ways that racial, linguistic, and gender stereotypes are jointly repro-
duced (McElhinny 2010; Bucholtz 2011; Chun 2011). Thus, the hearing practices
of listening subjects should not be analyzed apart from the intersectional subject
positions of communicators and interpreters alike.
While our analyses must attend to multiple dimensions of identity and the power
relations through which they are constituted, Puar (2007) warns against approaches
to intersectionality that frame identities in discrete ways such that they are only per-
ceived as intersecting in particular, quantifiable moments. Instead, Puar describes
these configurations of identity as ‘unstable assemblages of revolving and de-
volving energies, rather than intersectional coordinates’ (2007:175). Thus, a com-
parative intersectional and raciolinguistic approach necessarily considers how
assemblages of signs and identities are configured in particular contexts, from par-
ticular perspectives, and with particular consequences.
These shifting positionalities and assemblages of signs are reflected in Khan’s
(2014) work, which shows how in a post 9/11/2001 context, Muslims have faced
various modes of religiously oriented raciolinguistic profiling that involve the polic-
ing of semiotic forms such as clothing, facial hair, and language practices as potential
signs of terrorism. Raciolinguistic profiling links language and other semiotic forms
in ways that target various people and practices, such as a purportedly dark-haired,
olive-skinned ivy league economics professor from Italy who was escorted off a
2016 US-based flight for questioning after a white woman perceived the mathemat-
ical calculations he was writing by hand as a potentially threatening foreign lan-
guage in conjunction with his appearance and allegedly standoffish demeanor.
These profiling practices involve assemblages of signs that bundle together to po-
sition individuals in various ways depending on the context, but also reflect long-
standing processes of raciolinguistic subject formation that profoundly shape and
often overdetermine individual presentations of self and perceptions of Others.
From this perspective, what might appear as racial and semiotic flexibility at
the level of individual bodies and practices, can in fact involve the reproduction
and rearticulation of broader racial and linguistic structures within emergent con-
texts. This echoes Hesse’s (2016:viii) ‘colonial constitution of race thesis’,
which holds that ‘[r]ace is not in the eye of the beholder or on the body of the
objectified’, but instead ‘an inherited western, modern-colonial practice of vio-
lence, assemblage, superordiantion, exploitation, and segregation… demarcat-
ing the colonial rule of Europe over non-Europe’. Hesse locates the origins of
race in coloniality not bodies, and directs attention to the ways that colonial dis-
tinctions are recursively remapped within and across nation-state settings.
From this perspective, while race and language come to be experienced in pow-
erfully embodied and perceivable ways, the analysis of individual bodies and com-
municative practices must be situated within broader historical and institutional
frames. Critical analyses of racial embodiment and racialized communicative prac-
tices necessitate an interrogation of the joint production of racial and linguistic cat-
egories, attending to the ways that they become tied to forms of governance and
institutionality that profoundly condition everyday life. If we begin with individual
racialized bodies and communicative practices, then we are limited in our capacity
to apprehend the ways in which they become racially and linguistically legible,
overdetermined, or constituted in advance of analysis. That is, categories of race
and language are often understood as self-evident and defined circularly, such
that race is the social construction of race and named languages are straightforward
sets of linguistic forms. No embodied form is inherently racialized nor is any
linguistic form discretely classifiable in relation to a named language, yet many
analyses proceed as though this were the case. Thus, analyses of shifting, intersec-
tional positionalities and assemblages of signs must situate individual embodi-
ments and language practices in relation to broader structures and patterns of power.
Raciolinguistic approaches to the analysis of intersectional identity formations
and assemblages of signs and materialities are deeply anchored in concerns
about the ways inequities are reproduced and challenged through institutional
and interactional practices. The following section builds from these concerns to
consider the theories of change that inform a raciolinguistic perspective.
THE CONTESTATION OF RACIAL AND

LINGUISTIC POWER FORMATIONS
There are longstanding, widespread templates for contesting raciolinguistic ideolo-

gies within broader racial justice struggles. These include the framing of bilingual
education as central to radical US Latinx anticolonial, antiracist, and anticapitalist
efforts in the late 1960s and 1970s (Flores 2016); projects promoting indigenous
language reclamation rather than simply revitalization (Leonard 2012); and the as-
sertion of linguistic and cultural rights in global struggles against anti-Blackness
(Makoni, Smitherman, Ball, & Spears 2003). Building from these movements, a
raciolinguistic perspective refocuses our theory of social change away from the
modification of the linguistic behaviors of racialized populations toward a disman-
tling of the white supremacy that permeates mainstream institutions as a product of
colonialism.
This reframed theory of change builds not only on insights from social move-
ments, but also longstanding linguistic anthropological work on language and po-
litical economy (Gal 1989; Irvine 1989) alongside the recent material turn in
applied linguistics (Pennycook 2015), which seeks to bring attention to the ways
that language shapes and is shaped by the political and economic conditions of
global capitalism. Shankar & Cavanaugh (2012:356) formulate this as ‘language
materiality’, which considers ‘how language is involved in commodification, circu-

lation, and value formation’. Heller & Duchêne (2012) provide an example of lan-
guage materiality through their analysis of pride and profit as two discourses that
interact with each other in complex ways within the latest stage of global capitalism.
They connect pride with nation-states, arguing that this primary unit of political
organization within industrial capitalism was structured in relation to a European
bourgeoisie that molded the European labor force in ways that maximized its
profits. The joint promotion of national pride and a national language was a pow-
erful tool used to ensure the cooperation of the labor force. In contrast, profit
‘moves away altogether from modern ideologies of language, culture, and identity,
to treat language instead as a technical skill’ (Heller & Duchêne 2012:8). This move
toward profit and the commodification of language is situated within a broader
process of neoliberalism that involves deregulation and the transition from national
to transnational markets (Shankar & Cavanaugh 2012).
By bringing attention to these broader political and economic processes, this ma-
terialist approach challenges us to reconsider the efficacy of a focus on language
apart from the wider political economy in which it is situated. Yet, analyses of lan-
guage and political economy that place a narrow emphasis on issues of socioeco-
nomic class overlook the significance of race in the structuring of global
markets, societal hierarchies, and forms of stigmatization. For example, while
there is ample evidence of the stigmatization of the language practices of
working class and poor white populations (Wolfram 1984), this stigmatization
rarely calls into question their fundamental humanity, serves as grounds for their
deportation, or is mobilized as a justification for their extra-judicial killing. Urciuoli
(1998) explores processes of ethnicization and racialization in her analysis of the
ways in which working-class whiteness becomes an embodiment of the ‘good
ethnic citizen’ in contrast to problematic racial Others. Thus, while whiteness is in-
ternally heterogeneous and hierarchically stratified in various institutional settings,
it continues to be distinguished from nonwhiteness in its figuration as a comparably
idealized or legitimate form of citizen-subjectivity.
With this in mind, a raciolinguistic perspective infuses socioeconomic class
analyses with a focus on race and vice versa through the adoption of a critical
‘raceclass’ approach that not only challenges the co-constitution of racial and
class hierarchies, but also forges a joint critique of white supremacy and capitalism
(Leonardo 2012). In this way, a raciolinguistic perspective combines the material
turn in applied linguistics and linguistic anthropology with the work of race theo-
rists who have examined the role of race in various reconfigurations of global cap-
italism (Robinson 2000). In particular, Omi & Winant (1994) argue that specific
racial formations have taken shape throughout modern history, reconfiguring
white supremacy in ways that accommodate changing political and economic cir-
cumstances. From this perspective, changes related to global capitalism theorized
by scholars who are part of the material turn in applied linguistics and linguistic an-
thropology can be understood both as shifts in the global political and economic
world order that benefit economic elites largely at the expense of working-class and
poor people, as well as shifts in the global racial order that maintain white suprem-
acy through the subordination and marginalization of racialized populations.
Raciolinguistic ideologies have played a key role in the reproduction and
reconfiguration of racial formations across historical and contemporary political
and economic contexts. For example, Aggarwal (2016) describes the emergence
of a reconfigured racial formation following the Brown v. Board of Education
Supreme Court decision and the end of legal segregation in the United States. In
this emergent, post-Brown era of racial formation, the root cause of racial disparities
in educational achievement was located not in the inequitable distribution of mate-
rial resources but rather in the deficiency of racialized students and their families.
By extension, the solution to racial disparities was framed in terms of changing
the individual behaviors of racialized populations rather than structural change
within white supremacist institutions. Aggarwal points to aforementioned interven-
tions intended to close the so-called ‘word gap’ between children from low-income
communities of color and mainstream white communities as a contemporary
example of this individualistic framing.
This representation of inequity as a matter of modifying individual behaviors, as
opposed to challenging or dismantling institutional structures of power, is not
unique to the United States. Instead, it is part of a broader global racial formation
that emerged in the post-World War II era, which Melamed (2011) theorizes as a
shift from white supremacist modernity to a formally antiracist liberal capitalist mo-
dernity. This shift, which deceptively reinforced white supremacy by placing new
demands on racialized populations to modify their behaviors, impacted the emerg-
ing field of sociolinguistics and the theory of social change that informed the work
that came out of it. Indeed, a common view in sociolinguistics is that societies
should affirm the language practices of racialized populations while providing
them with access to dominant ways of using language. While on one level this
framing of the issue celebrates multiculturalism and multilingualism, on another
level it is premised on modifying the behaviors of racialized populations in ways
that obscure how white supremacy structures these populations’ experiences and
societal positionalities (Flores & Rosa 2015). As a result, many interventions pro-
posed by sociolinguists reify the racial formation associated with the latest stage of
global capitalism and obscure the nature of white supremacy.
This obfuscation of white supremacy is reflected in economic metaphors such as
‘linguistic/cultural capital’, ‘linguistic resources’, ‘funds of knowledge’, and ‘in-
vestment’, which are often invoked by researchers in their efforts to increase the
value of stigmatized language varieties and practices (Leonardo 2012). These
efforts towards legitimation through accumulation neglect the structural logics of
racial capitalism through which particular populations are perpetually marginal-
ized. Thus, we must not interpret the class ascendance of particular racialized
persons as a product of their accumulation of cultural and linguistic capital, but
rather as a legitimating articulation of white supremacy, a precarious positionality
that is often derided at the same time that it is celebrated (Alim & Smitherman
2012), and a central component of diversity-based institutional projects that com-
modify racial visibility while reproducing racial marginalization (Shankar 2015;
Urciuoli 2016).
The deceptive nature of race and class dynamics in the institutionalization of di-
versity—and the importance of a critical raceclass perspective on language—is
demonstrated in contemporary discourses of bilingual education and language
learning more broadly. The promotion of bilingual education as preparation for par-
ticipation in a global economic marketplace obscures the often racialized modes of
exclusion that circumscribe the forms of value that come to be associated with par-
ticular populations and language practices (Petrovic 2005). These fraught processes
of valuation and devaluation are exemplified by a recent US-based side-by-side ad-
vertisement for a Spanish language-learning book and English language-learning
book. The ad for the Spanish language-learning book features a light-skinned
man in a shirt and tie. It reads, Can’t speak Spanish? You need this book!. The
ad for the English language-learning book features a brown-skinned man in a
casual shirt and reads, ¿No habla inglés? ¡Necesita este libro! ‘You don’t speak
English? You need this book!’. What might appear as an innocuous language-learn-
ing ad that promotes bilingualism and linguistic diversity in fact bundles together
troublesome ideologies of race, class, and gender. These ideologies align
Spanish language learning with the consolidation of white male socioeconomic
superiority and English language learning with nonwhite male (im)migrant labor
subordination. Similar ideologies of race, class, and linguistic diversity are at
play in the contemporary valorization of bilingual education among middle- and
upper-class whites, which often relies on low-income bilingual and multilingual
children of color to function as repositories of cultural difference in service of ra-
cially and socioeconomically normative students in dual-language classrooms
(Valdés 1997). Thus, a raciolinguistic analysis of the institutionalization of linguis-
tic diversity requires a careful consideration of how structures of privilege and
power are reproduced or disrupted through such programming.
This raciolinguistic analysis points to the limits of the current theory of change in
liberal multicultural framings of sociolinguistics. Such framings characteristically
celebrate linguistic diversity and attribute racialized populations’ marginalization
to a lack of access to standardized language forms. This focus on linguistic solutions
fails to account for the workings of white supremacy within global capitalism. The
theory of social change that we propose here attempts to move beyond accommo-
dation-oriented policies that ‘accept the existing structure… and seek to accomplish
certain goals within that structure’ (Park & Wee 2012:167) toward a reconfigura-
tion-oriented approach that aims ‘to challenge… the existing structure… seeking
as its fundamental goal to transform the structure’ (Park & Wee 2012:168).
Rather than taking the accommodationist stance that the language practices of
racialized communities must be modified in order to combat racial inequity, a re-
configuration-oriented approach seeks to connect language struggles to broader
contestations of power. From this perspective, efforts to promote linguistic diversity

in education are not seen as inherently good, but rather are situated within a broader
political and economic analysis that seeks to understand how these efforts reinforce
and/or challenge racial and class inequities.
Returning to the example of bilingual education, this reframed theory of change
would situate bilingual education advocacy in broader efforts to dismantle racial
capitalism. That is, the only way for bilingual education to dismantle racial inequi-
ties is by situating advocacy for these programs within a comprehensive approach to
community and societal transformation that addresses the white supremacist and
capitalist relations of power that are root causes of these disparities. Focusing our
theory of change on these structural issues is in no way intended to suggest that bi-
lingual education or other such educational approaches that valorize language di-
versity are unimportant or that such programs do not improve the education of
language-minoritized students. On the contrary, a great deal of evidence suggests
that these programs do, in fact, benefit language-minoritized students (Collier &
Thomas 2004). Yet, what this focus on structural issues suggests is that without
concerted efforts to combat the racial inequities that are foundational to and exac-
erbated by global capitalism, the commodification of language associated with
efforts to promote these programs will benefit class-normative white people more
than racialized populations both in the US and abroad.
TOWA R D A R AC I O L I N G U I S T I C OT H E R W I S E
In this article we have sought to build on decades of US-based research challenging

deficit perspectives on the language practices of racialized populations. The racio-
linguistic perspective that we propose refuses to take racialized assessments of lin-
guistic deficiency at face value as claims that can be disproved if we provide
sufficient scientific evidence, and points to the benefit of redirecting attention to
the historical and contemporary processes that structure the co-naturalization of lan-
guage and race across various societal settings. Our goal is not only to understand
these structuring processes, but also to envision unsettling the terms of race and lan-
guage as part of broader efforts toward decolonization and the eradication of white
supremacy. Thus, we are not simply advocating linguistic pluralism or racial inclu-
sion, but instead interrogating the foundational forms of governance through which
such diversity discourses deceptively perpetuate disparities by stipulating the terms
on which perceived differences are embraced or abjected.
We have experienced firsthand how even when people of color are perceived as
successfully engaging in standardized academic language practices, these percep-
tions position them as ‘exceptional’ in relation to other members of racialized pop-
ulations who have not been provided access to such normatively defined success.
Indeed, an integral component of the continued legitimation of racial capitalism
is the recruitment of ‘exceptional’ people of color to seek entry to white supremacist
institutions and acceptance by white listening subjects (Ahmed 2012). Thus,
proposed linguistic solutions to racial inequities produced through European colo-

nialism often fails to address the root cause of the problem. Efforts to facilitate ra-
cialized populations’ mastery of supposed ‘codes of power’ (Delpit 2006) are not
empowering in the ways that are regularly discussed in sociolinguistics and
related fields, but rather a mechanism for producing governable subjects that
support the raciolinguistic status quo. Alternatively, the raciolinguistic perspective
that we present here represents our effort to theorize the co-naturalization of race
and language as a necessary step toward reimagining and reconstituting not only
racial and linguistic formations, but also the range of historical, political, economic,
and sociocultural structures to which they are linked.
NOTES
*We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who helped to focus and strengthen this man-
uscript, as well as Jenny Cheshire and Angela Reyes for their editorial guidance. We would also like to
thank the audiences at the Advanced Research Collaborative at CUNY Graduate Center, Sociolinguistic
Symposium 21 in Murcia, Spain, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and the
Social Science Matrix at the University of California Berkeley, where we presented earlier versions of
this work.
1
Toni Morrison at Portland State, May 30, 1975. From Portland State University’s Oregon Public
Speakers Collection: ‘Black Studies Center public dialogue. Pt. 2’. Online: http://mackenzian.com/
wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Transcript_PortlandState_TMorrison.pdf; accessed November 25, 2016.
2
We use Latinx as a gender nonbinary label for US-based persons of Latin American descent. We use
the terms Latino and Latina when referring to self-identified males and females, respectively.
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(Received 2 December 2016; revision received 20 May 2017;

accepted 26 June 2017; final revision received 28 June 2017)
Address for correspondence:

Jonathan Rosa
Stanford University
Graduate School of Education
485 Lasuen Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
[email protected]
Nelson Flores
University of Pennsylvania
Graduate School of Education
3700 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
nfl[email protected]
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Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic

Article in Language in Society · September 2017

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Unsettling race and language: Toward a

This article presents what we term a raciolinguistic perspective, which theo-

In US-based sociolinguistics and beyond there is a longstanding history of chal-

Taking our cue from Morrison, we seek to theorize a raciolinguistic perspective,

622 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY CO-

Contemporary raciolinguistic ideologies must be situated within colonial histories

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 623

624 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

colonial advocates for indigenous communities depicted indigenous populations as

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 625

European language in order to become modern citizen-subjects of contemporary

626 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

PERCEPTIONS OF RACIAL AND LINGUISTIC

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 627

628 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 629

Whiteness is also animated through nonhuman entities such as technologies and

REGIMENTATIONS OF RACIAL AND

630 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

languages/varieties and racial categories are continually reproduced. Analyses of

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 631

632 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

historical origins and continuous (re)emergence of native and nonnative position-

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 633

pronunciation of bad (Standard English) as baaad (Mexican American English) in

RACIAL AND LINGUISTIC INTERSECTIONS

Our effort to conceptualize a raciolinguistic approach to the study of language in

634 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

(Gal 2012). In contrast to racial distinctiveness or disavowal, our proposed raciolin-

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 635

636 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

THE CONTESTATION OF RACIAL AND

There are longstanding, widespread templates for contesting raciolinguistic ideolo-

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 637

materiality’, which considers ‘how language is involved in commodiﬁcation, circu-

638 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 639

640 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

contestations of power. From this perspective, efforts to promote linguistic diversity

In this article we have sought to build on decades of US-based research challenging

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 641

proposed linguistic solutions to racial inequities produced through European colo-

642 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 643

644 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 645

646 Language in Society 46:5 (2017)

(Received 2 December 2016; revision received 20 May 2017;

Address for correspondence:

Language in Society 46:5 (2017) 647

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