Language Hegemony
What is Standard English? Does it exist? Is it a widely accepted criteria for how a person ought to sound? Can we get rid of it? Should we? Is it encouraging people to think, write, read, speak, act White? Is there a blueprint for matriculation without it?
I think it exists. When we use terms like “writes well,” or “speaks well,” or “sounds educated,” we have a general idea, collectively, of what that means. It is present in education, the workforce, the media, our legal system, political rhetoric, standardized tests.
What would it mean to dismantle this standard? What would replace it? Should we emphasize English everywhere in America since it’s our national tongue? What kind of English? Is it a desirable goal that a student could get any degree from any discipline at any college without a need to demonstrate proficiency in this standard? Otherwise you’re saying, well we have to keep some of it White and affluent and therefore exclusionary. If college has a centuries-old legacy as set up for White people’s success, how far should we go in deemphasizing this language standard in an effort to facilitate success for other people, who are now under more pressure than ever to succeed academically starting at the age of four or five?
Other questions: should native English speakers feel obligated to learn a new language, for enrichment, for communication, out of respect for those who are working to learn their language? Should Standard English exist as a necessary evil, as a starting point, as the ideal way to communicate? What of the fact that it is spreading globally faster than ever before?
Many argue for Standard English. Many give partial apologies. Many are trying to explain how it became the ideal. In “Accent, Standard Language Ideology, and Discriminatory Pretext in the Courts” Professor of Linguistics Rosina Lippi-Green states “Because the written word was developed and exists to convey decontextualized information over time and space, standardization is necessary and appropriate. The problem at hand has come about because of a blurring between the written/spoken boundary; the written language has acquired dominance in the minds of speakers, so that goals appropriate for the written language are generalized to speaking, and the written word is adopted as a model for all language” (192). So, insofar as writing represents a formalization of communication, a shared standard is useful. But when writing becomes the model for speaking, or the way good writing should look, then we might begin to equate this formality with intelligence, erudition, education, learnedness, etc., and with English this can be a de facto form of White supremacy because in essence the standard is a White one, and thus affluent, “educated” White communication becomes idealized. What if “Rich White English” were just a subcategory of English, like Spanglish, or Hindlish, or Franglish? Would the “standard” be a more accessible version?
Some argue for a standardized form of English in part, something akin to musicians learning the scales maybe. British scholar Urszula Clark in “A Sense of Place: Variation, Linguistic Hegemony and the Teaching of Literacy in English” says “the fact remains that much subject knowledge is assessed and judged through expression in writing that demands a certain level of competence in standard English” (73). Later in her essay, she writes, “situational use of language can indeed transcend traditional social categories, and individuals draw upon linguistic resources in creative and innovative ways, but this is only possible once a certain degree of competence in standard English and linguistic awareness has been achieved” (74). In today’s world, there is no denying that proficiency in it will lead to upward mobility and is in fact necessary for academic matriculation, and teachers, Clark argues, “risk denying pupils the social and economic advantages education can bring” by declining to foster proficiency in it (60).
Competence in Standard English may even be a prerequisite to decentering its presence in American life and the international community. In “The Paradox of Linguistic Hegemony and the Maintenance of Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States,” Language Education Professor Debra Suarez states “the paradox of the resistance to linguistic hegemony is that in order to be successful, this resistance necessitates acquiescence to this hegemony on a certain level, namely proficiency in the dominant language” (512) and that “successful resistance may lie in the usefulness of the dominant language” (515); she quotes Norwegian anthropologist T. H. Eriksen, who states, “With no knowledge of (dominant) languages, one remains parochial and powerless” (515). In a 2018 article that appeared in The Guardian titled “Behemoth, Bully, Thief: How the English Language is Taking Over the Planet,” journalist Jacob Mikanowski writes, “The hegemony of English is now such that, in order to be recognised, any opposition to English has to formulated in English in order to be heard.” In an interview, Asao Inoue, Professor of Academic Affairs, Equity, and Inclusion as Arizona State University, said to his interviewer, “I’m not saying that there aren’t good things about those things, about (White language) practices. You and I now are certainly using some of those practices to be able to have this conversation.”
More on the entrenchedness of Standard English: there are, in America and globally, millions of parents who believe for their children to have better lives, they will need to learn this English. In a “Race Radicals Want to Abolish Standard English,” published in Britain’s The Sunday Times, author and journalist Melanie Phillips writes “Many ambitious working-class parents of all ethnicities have sought to ensure that their children speak grammatically correct English with received pronunciation in order to be taken seriously and become upwardly mobile.” Removing it from education, according to Professor of Education Paul A. J. Beehler, “could very well harm first and second generation students, effectively isolating and marginalizing the most vulnerable groups in American universities” (165). He also says, in an essay titled “Cracking the Code (Meshing and Switching): Standard English as a Required Ticket to Influence,” that “Standard English provides a platform for inclusivity that is arguably absent in multiple Englishes” and that “a common, or standard, language can be the gateway through which all individuals can fully participate in society because participation occurs through the nexus of a common language, whatever that language may be” (166). Beehler also says “Standard English is essential for accurate communication precisely because it minimizes difference in linguistic terms, and…it is a skill that is highly sought after in the marketplace” (168); also “To foster the most fluid and accurate exchange of ideas, a process that grants participants access to economic and social power, depends to an extent on a standard language. Social circumstances over the last several hundred years, for good or ill, have led the international community to the acceptance of English as that standard language. As educators, we will greatly advance our students if we provide intense instruction in Standard English. Alternatively, those well-intentioned teachers who choose to withhold such instruction for whatever reason will likely disadvantage their students and visit real-world harm” (170).
Others claim this is a bunch of garbage, that this is imposing White language norms on others, and that we underestimate how it affects people, especially children, when they are told the way they speak and write is deficient, and how that devalues them, and their relationship with education, from a very young age. In her book Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, Professor of Linguistics April Baker-Bell, who in her book talks about the effect this has on children and teenagers, says “this notion of Standard English is hypothetical and socially constructed” and “is maintained through arbitrary ideas that reflect language superiority” and “is a myth that is used to justify discrimination” (82). In an essay titled “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Professor of Linguistics Vershawn Ashanti Young says “Teaching speakin and writin prescriptively…force people into patterns of language that aint natural or easy to understand” (112). In his book For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too, Columbia University Professor and Associate Director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education Christopher Emdin writes, “In schools, urban youth are expected to leave their day-to-day experiences and emotions at the door and assimilate into the culture of schools. This process of personal repression is in itself traumatic and directly impacts what happens in the classroom” (23). In an article that appeared on the blog for the National Council of Teachers of English titled “Decolonizing the Classroom: Step 1,” English teacher Michael Seward encourages teachers, especially White teachers, to “Acknowledge that your role as a teacher has been historically problematic: that by teaching English you are inherently complicit with forces that damage marginalized students” and that “by promoting notions of a standard, correct and preferred language, you are perpetuating colonization, ensuring that future students will suffer the same marginalization.” Beehler disagrees. He brings up Rodolfo Jacobson, who in a 1971 article “Cultural Linguistic Pluralism and the Problem of Motivation” wrote “The knowledge of Standard English is necessary to function successfully in our society; and if Standard English is freed from its unjustified association with ‘Anglo speech’ and ‘white man’s talk’ and is merely considered a standardized tool of communication, no harm can possibly be inflicted to the learner’s self-image nor can its enforcement be considered a construct of white racism.” Is it possible to deracialize it and see it as a shared language tool? Suarez doesn’t think so. She writes, “linguistic hegemony exerts and legitimates power by presenting the dominant language as an instrument, or tool to be used by those who acquire it” (514). Deracializing, then, is reracializing.
In an essay published in the journal World Englishes titled “Linguistically Privileged and Cursed? American University Students and the Global Hegemony of English” Professor of Mass Communications and Journalism Christof Demont-Heinrich discusses polling American college students on the necessity of learning Standard English not just in America, but around the world. The answers, he found broke into five categories: (1) triumphalism; (2) instrumentalism; (3) multiculturalism; (4) instrumentalism and multiculturalism, and (5) “wistful regret” (294). The first is a typically right-leaning, U.S.A. is #1 and we have won the language wars, I don’t feel sorry for you, you better learn to speak it. Instrumentalism, the most common response, was that for better or worse, fair or unfair, there is no doubt you have an advantage if you can speak it. Multiculturalism is the idea that we all are enriched by learning new languages, and Americans should do it out of respect for others who are learning English (though there may be some “performative wokeness” going on here: according to the latest census data, 78% of Americans only speak English). He writes “the vast majority of the American students queried had little to no knowledge of a foreign language. This state of affairs is simply unimaginable for virtually any other group of university students in the world” (296). Even wistful regret, the idea that it’s just so unfair, kind of leads to the same place as all the rest, Demont-Heinrich argues. At the end of the day, you need to know it – that’s the fundamental position of every category.
English is entrenched worldwide, and it’s getting worse. Globally, according to Mikanowski, “Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.” The article mentions Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan, who divides languages into four categories: “Lowest on the pyramid are the ‘peripheral languages,’ which make up 98% of all languages, but are spoken by less than 10% of mankind. These are largely oral, and rarely have any kind of official status. Next are the ‘central languages,’ though a more apt term might be ‘national languages.’ These are written, are taught in schools, and each has a territory to call its own: Lithuania for Lithuanian, North and South Korea for Korean, Paraguay for Guarani, and so on…Following these are the 12 ‘supercentral languages’: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili – each of which (except for Swahili) boast 100 million speakers or more. These are languages you can travel with. They connect people across nations. They are commonly spoken as second languages, often (but not exclusively) as a result of their parent nation’s colonial past…Then, finally, we come to the top of the pyramid, to the languages that connect the supercentral ones. There is only one: English, which De Swaan calls ‘the hypercentral language that holds the entire world language system together.’”
The trend is accelerating. Mikanowski writes that more and more European novels, “whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German – have not only assimilated the style of English, but perhaps more insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be easily digestible in an anglophone context.” He writes that “in the past 50 years, Italian syntax has shifted towards patterns that mimic English models, for instance in the use of possessives instead of reflexives to indicate body parts and the frequency with which adjectives are placed before nouns” and that “German is also increasingly adopting English grammatical forms, while in Swedish its influence has been changing the rules governing word formation and phonology.” He also tells us that “In 2008, Rwanda switched its education system from French to English, having already made English an official language in 14 years earlier (and) When South Sudan became independent in 2011, it made English its official language despite having very few resources or qualified personnel with which to teach it in schools”; furthermore, in South Korea, “according to the sociolinguist Joseph Sung-Yul Park, English is a ‘national religion.’ Korean employers expect proficiency in English, even in positions where it offers no obvious advantage” and “An increasing number of parents in South Korea have their children undergo a form of surgery that snips off a thin band of tissue under the tongue Most parents pay for this surgery because they believe it will make their children speak English better.” In an article that appeared in the BBC titled “Can English Remain the ‘World’s Favourite’ Language?” journalist Robin Lustig writes, “In Uganda…all secondary schools must conduct classes entirely in English, and some parents teach their young children English as their first language.” In an article titled “Intellectual Imperialism: Definitions, Traits and Problems” published in Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, Malaysian Sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas writes, “it is common notion in Asia that real knowledge lays in English and not in local languages” (28). In an article published on Inside Higher Ed titled “The Increasing Dominance of English,” Professor of International Higher Education Hans de Wit writes “60 percent of courses in Dutch research universities are now taught in English, and for the master level it is 70 percent. The engineering universities in Delft and Eindhoven stand out with 100 percent of their graduate courses taught in English.” In 2012, Milan University Politecnico di Milano announced the shift from Italian to English for all graduate education.
Who does this devalue? And how? Do you buy into the notion that when you take someone away from their language you take them away from their identity, their culture, their sense of self? What is the collateral damage from promoting White ways of speaking, writing, communicating, being, to children from a young age? Throughout society? All over the earth? Lippi-Green says “when people reject an accent, they also reject the identity of the person speaking; his or her race, ethnic heritage, national origin, regional affiliation, or economic class” (165). Baker-Bell says “the way a Black child’s language is devalued in school reflects how Black lives are devalued in the world. Similarly, the way a White child’s language is privileged and deemed the norm in schools is directly connected to the invisible ways that White culture is deemed normal, neutral and superior in the world” (2). Black students, she thinks, ought to be told “they are communicating in a valid linguistic system…[and] taught to be able to pinpoint and name the features of their own linguistic system” (72) because “children of color’s experiences navigating and negotiating language will be impacted by the interlocking system and structures of linguicism, racism, and classism, which are interrelated and continuously shaping one another” (16) and “when Black students are taught to hate Black speech, it indirectly teaches them to hate themselves” (60). This is part of how Black children “navigate and negotiate their linguistic, racial, and sociopolitical identities within multiple, hostile contexts” (iv – and this last quote is from the editors’ forward to her book, Professors of Education Valeria Kinloch and Susi Long).
In her essay, Clark writes “speakers of regional varieties of English different from standard English…are equally subject to discourses of deficit and continue to be positioned either as intellectually challenged and/or educationally disadvantaged” (61). In the article “The Risky Business of Engaging Racial Equity in Writing Instruction: A Tragedy in Five Acts,” the article’s five authors, all writing instructors, argue students are impacted by “home languages and cultures that for generations have been deeply devalued if acknowledged at all by the dominant cultural practices surrounding them” and “It is no accident that these are the cultures most damaged by American settler colonialism and therefore most damaged by the ongoing colonization echoing through our white-dominant classrooms” (353). In an essay titled “Linguistic Hegemony in Academia and the Devaluation of Minority Identity in Higher Education,” Joe Henao argues “The effects of drastically, and coercively altering one’s language, or linguistic characteristic, may affect the subject’s identity and community relations.” The article “Analyzing Linguistic Hegemony in the Society: Attitudes of Functional Native Learners Towards English” is a study of Pakistani students forced to learn English through compulsory language-acquisition classes; its authors, Wafa Mansoor Buriro, Shafkat Kadri and Farheen Baqi Memon, who all teach at Pakistani universities, say many students’ attitudes about English lead them to devalue their native tongues, noting their drive to become fluent “reflected hegemony of English and showed negative attitudes towards Sindhi and MLs (Mother Languages)” (15). They also write “While learning English, people have been seen alienating themselves from their mother tongue” (19) and that some “said that they wanted mother tongue as primary medium of communication because one is emotionally attached” to it (29); furthermore “participants said that their mother tongue was their identity and they did not want to lose it by using English language to express themselves” (30).
One of the most significant figures in the language hegemony debate is Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose essay collection Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature is considered a seminal work on the topic. In a 2019 interview with Medium, the interviewer, Matthijs Bijl, writes that “Ngũgĩ attributes two functions to language: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture. We use it to define ourselves and others. It mediates our relationships with ourselves and others. It forms and transmits images of the world and reality” and “While colonial powers succeeded in physical subjugation through the bullet, language was the means of ‘spiritual subjugation.’ Spiritual subjugation was brought about through the destruction or undervaluing of a people’s culture and ‘the conscious elevation of the language of the coloniser.’” Ngũgĩ himself says in the interview, “The domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised.” The interview closes with Bijl quoting Ngũgĩ’s son Mukomi Wa, who believes “History moves on, theories of liberation march alongside it, but without our languages we will remain trapped within what literary critic Adam Beach calls the English metaphysical empire.” In a 2020 essay titled “The Weaponization of English,” professor of ESL Education Kisha C. Bryan and doctoral student J.P.B. Gerald write “White supremacist thought is embedded in the racialized discourses that portray Black and Brown peoples – their languages, cultures, and ways of living – as inherently inferior.”
Here’s a question: why put so much emphasis on “correct” language in the first place? In the article “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth” Chicana and Chicano Studies Professor Tara Yosso claims communication ranges far beyond language proficiency. She emphasizes “memorization, attention to detail, dramatic pauses, comedic timing, facial affect, vocal tone, volume, rhythm and rhyme…students may utilize different vocal registers to whisper, whistle or sing (and) must often develop and draw on various language registers, or style, to communicate with different audiences” (79). In Writing Without Teachers, Professor of English Peter Elbow writes, “In your natural way of producing words there is a sound, a texture, a rhythm, a voice – which is the main source of power in your writing” (6) and emphasizes writing’s “center of gravity,” which could be “an assertion, but it could also be a mood, an image, a central detail or event or object” (20). Can we separate language proficiency from communication proficiency? Can one communicate in America and the rest of the English-speaking world without showing mastery of Standard English? According to Lippi-Green, linguists “differentiate language from speech, speech from communication, and fluency from communicative competence” (165). She quotes the book Silver Burdett English: “Almost any sentence fragment may be acceptable in casual conversation. In more formal speaking and writing, however, nonstandard grammar is rarely acceptable” (167-168). Very few people actually speak Standard English.
In his article, Young talks about a 2002 incident in which Harvard President Lawrence Summers had a dispute with Professor of African-American studies Cornell West. Of the incident, Summers said “I regret any faculty member leaving a conversation feeling they are not respected.” In response to this statement, literary theorist Stanley Fish noted, in an article published in The New York Times, Summers’ “failure to mark the possessive case, failure to specify the temporal and the causal relationships…and failure to observe noun-pronoun agreement,” lamenting how the President of Harvard could use such poor English. But University of Illinois-Chicago linguist Kyoko Inoue objected to Fish’s criticisms, writing, “What the writer/speaker says (or means) often controls the form of the sentence” and, in Young’s view, this means “Summers’ intent make his sentence clear and understandable, not rules from the grammar police-man” (113). In The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker says a lot of grammar rules, especially ones that need to be taught, are not “of communication,” not organic to how we get meaning across through language, and are largely unnecessary. It comes down, in essence, to syntactics versus semantics – syntactics meaning most-correct structure, and semantics being meaning. When focusing on meaning, on communication, grammar takes a back seat. Might this be a way to decenter Standard English? Might it better help students engage with their writing, their expression, their styles, their own authentic voices?
How many are impacted by this? Hard to say. According to Demont-Heinrich, “The 2000 U.S. Census found that of the 262.4 million people in the U.S.A. aged five and over, 47 million (18%) spoke a language other than English at home, 28.1 million of them Spanish” (287). To update this: “The 2019 U.S. Census found that of the 309.5 million people in the U.S.A. aged five and over, 67.8 million (22%) spoke a language other than English, 41.7 million of them Spanish.” We’re getting less Englishy by the day. According to Wikipedia, approximately 430 languages are spoken or written in the United States. How many people are coming from language environments outside of the mainstream?
Where does all of this play out? One might argue education is ground zero. Seward writes “Anyone who teaches English outside of England is part of the colonial project, particularly if the teaching takes place within a sanctioned institution and if the English being taught is standardized, ‘official’ English.” Suarez interviewed several Spanish-speaking families about how they are raising their children, and found in one instance parents who wanted their child Richard to speak Spanish in the home and learn English at school, but “reconsidered this decision when Richard began Head Start at about four years of age, and they realised that they would be putting him in the difficult position of being laughed at and teased in school – much as they had been” (523). Four years old. Richard’s mother, Vivian, talked about her own experiences as a child, telling Suarez “you have teachers that don’t make it any easier for you. And you have teachers that make an impression on you, that leave scars for the rest of your life” (523). Buriro, Kadri and Memon say “teaching is not apolitical and it always carries with it the hidden ideology and propaganda of the ruling class to maintain its status quo” (33). Baker-Bell cites a book titled Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World, which mentions the “assimilationist and often violent white imperial project (that requires students) to lose or deny their languages, literacies, cultures, and histories in order to achieve in schools” (49). Baker-Bell quotes a Black student who says “Teachers treat you like you dumb when you talk (in Black English). Like earlier when Ms. Helen said I speak in a non-eloquent way” (58). Baker-Bell also writes “It is acceptable for Black Language to be used and capitalized on by non-native Black Language-speakers for marketing and for play, but it is unacceptable for Black kids to use it as a linguistic resource in school” (14).
Addressing a roomful of English teachers at the 2018 Conference on College Composition and Communication in a speech titled “How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy?” Inoue said “The market I call your attention to today is the market of White language preferences in schools, although it is also not hard to find the connections between it and the flows of capital.” He tells the teachers in the crowd “you, and White people just like you who came before you, have had most of the power, decided most of the things, built the steel cage of White language supremacy that we exist in today, both in and outside of the academy – and likely, many of you didn’t know you did it. You just thought you were doing language work, doing teaching, doing good work, judging students and their languages in conscientious and kind ways, helping them, preparing them, giving them what was good for them…You perpetuate White language supremacy in your classrooms because you are White and stand in front of students, as many White teachers have before you, judging, assessing, grading, professing on standards that came from your group of people…It’s the framework being used as a method to get students to write White, but not used to attend to an ever-widening universe of reflective discourses.” In the speech’s concluding remarks he says “We must stop justifying White standards of writing as a necessary evil. Evil in any form is never necessary. We must stop saying that we have to teach this dominant English because it’s what students need to succeed tomorrow. They only need it because we keep teaching it!” In another speech, he claimed “in White language supremacy, rewards are given to those who can most easily achieve standards that are set up for White, middle-class, monolingual students” and “current graded language practices favor White, monolingual, and middle class English speakers.” In an interview with Professor of English and Writing Paul T. Corrigan, Inoue said “What is wrong is valuing Standard English more than other ways of speaking and writing – since doing so devalues and places obstacles in the way of the speakers and writers who use those other ways” and “respecting language difference means not holding up a false language hierarchy in a classroom and judging all students against the one standard that creates that hierarchy.” In another interview, he said “I’m also not saying that what I might identify as a White language practice is…inherently bad. I certainly have those practices in me…However, it’s when we place those things as standards onto everyone – our students, all of them uniformly – and then judge and rank accordingly, that’s when it becomes a problem.”
In an article titled, “Educational Hegemony, Traumatic Stress, and African American and Latino American Students,” Professors of Counselor Education Rachel T. Goodman and Cirecie A. West‐olatunji write, “Hegemonic educational experiences that hinder achievement can result in disengagement from school, deviant behaviors, fewer opportunities in life, and difficulty earning a living wage” (176). Clark says “it is the ways in which teachers react to the use of non-standard forms in children’s speech, that can lead to academic disaffection and disenchantment” (66) and quotes a student in a middle school literacy program in Southwest Philadelphia called Da Bomb Squad who told her, “Of course, what is cast as ‘the language of the real world’ is the language of the dominating group – let’s call it what it is – the variety of English that’s consistent with the speech patterns and norms of use of educated, middle-class, white men” (69). Suarez talks about a school in New York, the site of her study, called Riverfront Hills High, which was “investigated by the New York State Department of Education,” and the investigation revealed “Too often, Latino students are given the strong, and intimidating message to, ‘Speak English, forget Spanish!’ In this sense, they are made to feel ashamed of their native language…and the absence of Latino and other minority educational information fosters in the children a sense of shame for their culture” (522).
One area of this debate is the concept of Code Switching, or Code-Mixing, or Code-Meshing. It is hard to find a consensus on what these phrases mean. According to an article titled “Code-Switching and Code-Mixing – What You Need to Know” that appeared on bilinguistics.com, Code-Switching is: “Alternating between two or more languages or language varieties/dialects in the context of a single conversation. Using elements of more than one language when conversing in a manner that is consistent with the syntax, morphology, and phonology of each language or dialect.” The website also claims “Truth be told, many people use the terms Code-Switching and Code-Mixing interchangeably. Some linguists, however, make a distinction in which Code Mixing refers to the hybridization of two languages (e.g. parkear, which uses an English root word and Spanish morphology) and Code-Switching refers to the movement from one language to another. Many pairs of languages have a hybrid name. Some languages hybridized with English include Spanglish for Spanish, Hindlish for Hindi, and Frenglish for French.” In education, Code-Meshing “is an instructional approach that invites multiple languages and language varieties within the classroom. The idea behind this approach is that students who speak other languages and language varieties should be encouraged to share those in the classroom and not be made to feel that their home language or dialect is any less valuable than any other dialect or language.”
But this ranges beyond students in a classroom. In the article “Code-Switching Is Not Trying to Fit in to White Culture, It’s Surviving It” journalist Ida Harris talks about how when teaching, she felt pressure to do this, and describes the impact it had on her: “My code-switching in the classroom occurred because I doubted that my authentic self was enough to be in the room, and that further complicated how I felt about myself.” She also says, “for many African Americans code-switching is a skillset that is integral to our survival.” In 2019, Harvard Business Review did a study on code-switching among adults in professional environments, and produced an article summarizing its findings titled “The Costs of Code-Switching” described therein as something that “involves adjusting one’s style of speech, appearance, behavior, and expression in ways that will optimize the comfort of others in exchange for fair treatment, quality service, and employment opportunities.” In work spaces, for “racial minorities, downplaying membership in a stigmatized racial group helps increase perceptions of professionalism and the likelihood of being hired” and “Expressing shared interests with members of dominant groups promotes similarity with powerful organizational members, which raises the chance of promotions because individuals tend to affiliate with people they perceive as similar.” The article later states that “minorities who code-switch are likely to face a professional dilemma: Should they suppress their cultural identity for the sake of career success? Or should they sacrifice potential career advancement for the sake of bringing their whole selves to work?”
According to Baker-Bell, who focuses on the impact of code-switching on Black children, particularly in school, we should, collectively, question “the role that Anti-Black Linguistic Racism plays in why they are being asked to ‘code’ their language in the first place” (30), but also brings up a conversation with a Black man who says “I’m frequently in white neighborhoods…and using White Mainstream English is necessary in these contexts. I wouldn’t want people looking down at me a specific way because of the way I talk” (95). Earlier in her book, she notes the pressure to speak this English from other members of the Black community. The valuation of this English “is often upheld by members of the Black speech community,” she writes, “and it suggests that [a student named] Janel, like many Black Language-speakers, views her racial, linguistic, and intellectual identity through the white gaze in ways that negates her value” (54). She brings up a discussion of the book The Color Purple among Black students, where this dynamic was evident in their negative reactions to the character Celie’s Black English. Baker-Bell writes “The students’ reactions to Walker’s use of Black Language in The Color Purple illustrates how deeply ingrained Anti-Black Linguistic Racism is in Black Language-Speaking students” (24). She mentions English Professor Geneva Smitherman, who “coined the term push-pull in the 1970s to characterize the ambivalence Black Language-speakers feel about speaking Black Language” (26).
In his book, Emdin defines code-switching as “a practice that has taken root in fields like linguistics, sociology, and cultural anthropology, and that focuses on where and how a speaker alternates between two or more languages or dialects in the context of a conversation or interaction” (175). He claims “students must be taught to become code switchers, social chameleons, and instigators/catalysts of the new norms in the world through the development of new and powerful hybridized identities” because it represents “tools they need to be successful across social fields” and it will help them “navigate worlds beyond the classroom that have traditionally excluded” them (176). Addressing teachers, he writes “The nature of, and need for, code switching should be discussed with the students” (182).
What can teachers do in the classroom to actualize the decentering of White/Standard English? We’re talking about a country where 78% of people speak English only, where a good deal of the population will not support this initiative, and a global community that if anything is heading rapidly in the opposite direction. What to do? If teachers stop teaching Standard English to students of color, will White kids more exclusively acquire a key proficiency for upward mobility? Do we teach it to everyone until it is no longer so important to academic success? Clark recommends “the formation of a new alliances of interests, an alternative hegemony or ‘historical bloc,’ which has already developed a cohesive world view of its own and is thus capable of challenging or subverting dominant hegemony through political activity, including force” (62). Coalition-building can lead to systemic reformation as deeply and broadly as can be conceived. In the forward to Baker-Bell’s book, Geneva Smitherman asks us to consider, “How did the present social order come into being? What do we need to do to take it out of being? Teachers, language researchers, educational administrators, public policy theorists, critical race theorists, community activists, parents, high school youth – all need to be involved” (xv). Baker-Bell says “Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy alone cannot solve Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and white linguistic hegemony. We must continue to think about how we can work toward changing the structures, systems, and institutions that perpetuate linguistic racism and language subordination” (97). Sonia Nieto, in her book Finding Joy in Teaching Students of Diverse Backgrounds: Culturally Responsive and Socially Just Practices in U.S. Classrooms, cites a study that shows “the quality of a school explains only about a third of the variation in student achievement” (10). Other factors include “poverty, lack of quality preschool and afterschool programs, and inadequate employment, health care, and houses…poor nutrition, unhealthy neighborhoods, and limited prenatal care, among others” (10).
Another factor in the entrenching of Standard English in education is tests. Diane Ravitch in The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education takes on the many ways test-based education plagues K-12 schooling, but one thing she doesn’t really take on is how test reinforce White language hegemony. In a 2021 blog post, she did say “Standardized test scores are highly correlated with family income and education. The students from affluent families get the highest scores. Those from poor families get the lowest scores. This is the case on every standardized test, whether it is state, national, international, SAT, or ACT. Sometimes poor kids get high scores, and sometimes kids from wealthy families get low scores, but they are outliers. The standardized tests confer privilege on the already advantaged and stigmatize those who have the least. They are not and will never be, by their very nature, a means to advance equity.” White language standards reward affluent students, who are disproportionately White. And one thing we know is standardized testing is still rampant in K-12 education. In an article titled, “What Does the Research Say About Testing?” that appeared on the webpage Edutopia.org in 2019, journalist and education writer Carly Berwick writes that despite a wider variety of tests, many of which “focus on goals such as critical thinking and mastery rather than rote memorization,” the fact remains that “Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002 and its 2015 update, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), every third through eighth grader in U.S. public schools now takes tests calibrated to state standards” and “In a study of the nation’s largest urban school districts, students took an average of 112 standardized tests between pre-K and grade 12.”
What of the multicultural argument? How much can we lower that number of 78% of Americans who only speak English? Why would they learn another language if they don’t have to? Would a push for valuing multilingualism ignite accusations of elitism, inflame the ongoing culture war? So what if it did?
Arguing for the “enrichment” side, Mikanowski asks “What if anglo-globalism wasn’t a one-way street? What if the pre-contact languages of the Americas were taught in American high schools? What if British schoolchildren learned some of the languages spoken by the actual residents of the former empire?” Young thinks “we all should know everybody’s dialect, at least as many as we can, and be open to the mix of them in oral and written communication” (111). In an article titled “More Than Hateful Words,” by Colleen Flaherty that appeared in Inside Higher Ed, Dan Melzer, first-year composition associate director at the University of California, Davis, addresses native English speakers’ needs to be more linguistically flexible, stating students today “face a future that requires ‘communicating in global Englishes, working across languages and cultures, and integrating multiple types of literacies to multiple audiences for multiple purposes.” This sounds a lot like Emdin’s code-switching advocacy.
Regarding a “utilitarian” side, Suarez writes of one bilingual parent’s “Knowing both languages gives her (child) an advantage that a monolingual person does not have” (526). Could Americans see things the same way? To Suarez, this parent’s attitude seems like something forced on those born into language worlds outside the mainstream. Of one Spanish-speaking mother, she writes, “It is in bilingualism and biculturalism that she hopes that her children will have both access to school and job opportunities that English proficiency promises to give them, and also the connection with and pride in their Hispanic heritage that Spanish proficiency may promise” (526). Other parents “emphasized to their children the importance of both maintaining their culture and language, and also succeeding in the mainstream” (527). Emphasizing both rationales, Ngũgĩ says in an interview, while addressing New Zealand’s indigenous population, “For Maori I would say Maori language first, master it completely and then add English. That’s powerful!” He also says “if I am an immigrant to New Zealand I would like to master English as it is the language of power but if I could connect that to my language then I am able to connect to English as the language of power and actually I should be more powerful. It’s like we deny ourselves when our real power is taking our languages and adding to them and learning from other languages and that is real power. If I am an African American I don’t think of Ebonics as a lower language, it is a different signifying system. I’ve got to master the language of power so I can have both and I can be very powerful.”
In the classroom, Nieto encourages teachers to be multicultural people as a starting point for being multicultural teachers (20). Geneva Gay in the article “Teaching to and Through Cultural Diversity” thinks some of the questions teachers should ask are “What do I believe are the underlying causes of achievement difficulties of various culturally diverse students? Am I able and willing to articulate and scrutinize my beliefs about cultural diversity in general and about particular ethnic groups? Can I discern how specific beliefs about different ethnic populations are embedded in particular instructional decisions and behaviors? Am I willing to consider making significant changes in my attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, and, if so, do I know how to proceed?” (55). She thinks “access to knowledge about culturally responsive teaching from the perspectives of more ethnically diverse scholars, and a wider variety of subject matter orientations might increase teachers’ confidence and competence about implementing it in their own classrooms” (60). The authors of “The Risky Business of Engaging Racial Equity in Writing Instruction: A Tragedy in Five Acts” say teachers “must be willing to examine the assumptions of our work with the lenses of both critical race theory and queer theory – especially if this makes the most privileged faculty members uncomfortable” (363).
FYI – Critical Race Theory, or CRT, has been emerging as a controversial topic. It’s been around awhile, though; why now? One possible answer is schools getting more proactive about working it into K-12 curriculums, thus beaming it into our country’s increasingly volatile culture and political wars. CRT historically has been centered in examining the law’s intersections with race, and social and political power. It examines how White supremacy is an integral part of American history, and in the present day fortified by such things as America’s legal system, prison industrial complex, and law enforcement institutions. Queer Theory is in large part about how gender binaries are constructed and maintained in an existing social order, what is considered “normal” and what is considered “deviant.” Both of these fields are massive – I have worksheets for each under the “Guidelines” section of my website, comphaunt.com.
Inoue says “part of being a woke writing teacher, then, is a constant posing of problems about my own existential writing assessment situation, a continual articulating of paradoxes in my judgement that complicate how I make judgements, how I read and make meaning of the symbols my students give me and that I give back to them, how White language supremacy places limits and pressure on me, despite my efforts to counter such things, just as they do my students.” As for other classroom strategies? To begin, focus on the positive, the familiar, what students do well, and build out, but at the same time do not shy away from more difficult and uncomfortable subjects. Gay says “Students must experience academic success, develop and/or maintain contact and competence with their primary cultural heritages, and learn how to critique, challenge, and transform iniquities, injustices, oppressions, exploitations, power, and privilege” (51). Gay also says teachers should “concentrate more on the promise and potential of African American students instead of exclusively on their problems, and the analyses of Mexican American students’ community funds of knowledge” (54) because “learning derives from a basis of strength and capability, not weakness and failure” (55). Too often, she says, teachers stick to safe topics, “ethnic customs, cuisines, costumes, and celebrations while neglecting more troubling issues like inequities, injustices, oppressions, and major contributions of ethnic groups to societal and human life” (57). Consider such subjects as “civil rights protests…contemporary song lyrics…paintings of different ethnic artists…ethnic political rhetoric…social commentary poetry” (64) and consider how students might benefit from “studying their own local cultural communities, customs, traditions, and artifacts” (65).
Yosso wants teachers to focus on “Various forms of capital nurtured through cultural wealth (which) include aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial, and resistant capital” (69). Emphasize “listening to the lived experience and histories of those oppressed by institutionalized racism” (71). She urges teachers to focus on “inextricable layers of racialized subordination based on gender, class, immigration status, surname, phenotype, accent and sexuality” (73) and what scholar Daniel SolO’rzano calls “the centrality of experiential knowledge” (73). This can include “storytelling, family histories, biographies, scenarios, parables, cuentos (stories), testimonios, chronicles and narratives” and “scholarship from ethnic studies, women’s studies, sociology, history, law, psychology, film, theatre, and other fields” (74). It is important to remember “cultural capital is not just inherited or possessed by the middle class, but rather it refers to an accumulation of specific forms of knowledge, skills and abilities that are valued by privileged groups in society” (76). What cultures have capital in America? What is valued in them? What is outside the values of the American mainstream? Why? Is there a mainstream? What is it?
Young thinks we should “teach how language functions within and from various cultural perspectives” (112). Baker-Bell involves “dialogues, charts, graphs, instructional maps, images, artwork, stories, and weblinks” (7) and thematically focuses on “Language, Identity, History, Culture, Grammatical and Rhetorical Features of Black Language, Language and Power, Racial Positioning in Society, Agency and Action, a Language of Solidarity” (35). Inoue recommends “cultural artifacts that embody language, such as media, newspapers, articles, TV shows, movies, plays.” Seward says “teach to learning outcomes that address power and social justice.”
Inoue also proposes “an alternative class grading plan based on effort and labor rather than standardized skill,” which might lead students to take on riskier, more ambitious projects that incorporate their interests, skill sets, and strengths. He wants students “to articulate to themselves, to me and to the writer how they made the judgments they did and where those judgements came from, what they accounted for in the judgment of a particular passage or particular item on our rubric…When you get halfway through this 10 page chapter, stop…Tell us in one sentence, how do you feel? What does this reading make you feel? And anything goes.” He will then have students share responses on the web. And he argues not to assume you have the same ideas about things as students. He says “take curiosity, for instance, it can be used, if we are not careful about how dispositions mark curiosity for teachers, to perpetuate White language standards in writing classrooms. I mean how is a teacher going to grade on curiosity? What exactly is a teacher going to do in their assessment ecology because they want to promote the habit of mind called curiosity? In other words, what does it really look like?” It might help to generate what is called an IEP, or Individualized Education Plan, in which the teacher and the student come to terms on what meaningful engagement, what “getting an A” in the class, would entail.
In an article titled “Pedagogical Experiments in an Anthropology for Liberation” that appeared in the inaugural issue of the journal Commoning Ethnography, Cultural Anthropologist Lorena Gibson advocates “educating students in a way that they can reflexively and consciously enact sustainable social transformation in post-colonial contexts” (100) and claims “Decolonisation cannot occur without an understanding of the local context – and how you fit into that context. Our various intersecting identities means everyone identifies differently with their surroundings and has different relationships to the fields they are engaging in” (100). One can advocate what’s called intersectionality, the idea that multiple things go into our identity, and also positionality, which is the idea that few things about us or our circumstances are fixed; more like, changeable. Self-definition, the impact of stereotypes, and ideas about internal and external limitations can sprout from conversations and assignments dedicated to these things. One might look at things in one’s life that can be changed. Am I a “bad writer”? Or do I “currently struggle” with my writing, and am working to improve that? The former is a fixed mindset, the latter an example of positionality, in other words I don’t have to accept an eternal definition of “bad” or “deficient”; I can work to become “good” or “proficient.”
Some advocate that students be led to see injustice in various American, and world, systems, and think about their impact, and what can be done. We can talk about how different readers have different experiences with a text, different reactions, how students got their literacies, what they are, the politics of judgment, what their goals are for a project, what they think the teacher’s goals in judging it should be, what kind of problems do they want to pose and take on. In his book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing For a Socially Just Future, Inoue writes, “The local diversity of ideas, languages, judgments, and material contexts that students bring to bear on a text allows for the writing assessment ecology to be more than helping writers improve drafts. It becomes an ecology in which students liberate themselves from conventional assessment” (93) and that students should “see the white racial habitus…as just one discursive node in larger network of interconnected nodes” (95). In a web article titled “To Decolonize Our Minds, Start With Words,” Native American author and scholar Steven Newcomb writes, “Clearly, we must not stay within the mental and behavioral limits of the system we say we want to replace.”
A deeper type of empowerment, Emdin writes, can occur by giving students the authority of a teacher, where “there is a role reversal of sorts that positions the student as expert in his or own teaching and learning, and the teacher as the learner” (27). He believes “the teacher cannot fully meet the needs of students unless the students have an opportunity to show the teacher what they need and then demonstrate what good teaching looks like for them” (87) because “The students have to first connect to a classroom/school that welcomes their brilliance, celebrates it, and makes them realize that they have a natural ability to be academically successful” (176).
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