Language Variation and Change Workshop

February 14, 2020 | 3:30PM
Rosenwald 301

Raciolinguistic ideologies: Theory/method/politics
Jonathan Rosa, Stanford University (joint meeting with Semiotics: Culture in Context)

In scholarly and popular discourse alike, racial categories and linguistic forms are often understood as self-evident phenomena. In contrast, a raciolinguistic perspective interrogates historical and contemporary co-naturalizations of language and race. Centering on a raciolinguistic perspective, this workshop presentation examines how interrelations among race and language are recognized, as well as what is at stake analytically and politically in these recognitions. The argument is that a reconsideration of assumptions about identifications and classifications of race and language can enable emergent contestations of endemic societal power structures anchored in and reproduced by these phenomena.