Transcript: Language and Social Justice in the United States Event

Learn more about the Language and Social Justice in the United States event.

Read the full Dædalus issue, published Summer 2023.

David Oxtoby:

Good afternoon.  Welcome to this important conversation about language and social justice in the United States.  Our program today will center around the ideas advanced in the most recent issue of Daedalus, the quarterly journal of the American Academy.  A brief background about the American Academy, and about Daedalus.  In 1780, a group of patriots created the academy with the mission to guide the new nation.  Or, as stated in our charter, to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness, of a free, independent, and virtuous people.  Today, the academy is both an honorary society that recognizes and celebrates the excellence of its members, and an independent research center.  It convenes leaders from across disciplines, professions, and perspectives to address significant challenges, and recommend [00:01:00] solutions to some of the biggest issues facing the world.

Daedalus was first published in 1955, and has explored a breadth of topics over the past 68 years.  Topics such as climate change, mass incarceration, artificial intelligence, immigration, religion, women inequality, the humanities in American life, and the loss of trust in institutions and experts.  Every issue of Daedalus, no matter the focus, is distinguished by its rigor, authority, and contribution of new knowledge.

In January 2021, Daedalus became an open-access journal.  For the first time, faculty, students, researchers, and the interested public could access Daedalus content online without a password or payment.  In the time since, Daedalus has seen a significant increase in online readership, downloaded [00:02:00] essays, and citations.  We are proud of our decision to make Daedalus open access.  And by doing so, we have reinforced our commitment to sharing knowledge, promoting the exchange of ideas, and increase trust in information and its sources.

Our newest issue of Daedalus explores how linguistic justice, so central to social justice, has largely been left out of academic programs that address social and racial inequalities on campus, and in American society.  In fact, while higher education institutions have supported antiracism and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, they have at the same time been active agents in the reproduction of linguistic inequality.

We are grateful to the three guest editors of this Daedalus volume: Anne Harper Charity Hudley, Guadalupe Valdés, and Walt Wolfram, for their leadership [00:03:00] of, and vision for this collection.  Anne is Associate Dean of Educational Affairs, and the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education and African and African American Studies and Linguistics, by courtesy, in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Guadalupe is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education Emerita in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University.  And Walt is the William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Language and Life Project at North Carolina State University.  Guadalupe and Walt are also members of the American Academy.  Anne, Guadalupe, and Walt will lead today’s conversation.  Several of the authors in the Daedalus volume are also in attendance, and they will participate in the Q and A session of our program.

All of the essays in the Daedalus issue on language and social justice in the United States are available on the Academy’s website.  If you haven’t [00:04:00] yet, I encourage you to spend time with the collection following the program.

It is now my pleasure to turn things over to Walt Wolfram.

 

Walt Wolfram:

First of all, I want to thank Daedalus editors for such a great job.  Actually, the editing of this volume was one of the seamless editing jobs I’ve done in my life.  And I’ve been doing this for a few decades now.  So thank you very much.  It was great to work with the staff.  And if anybody ever has a chance to publish with Daedalus, absolutely do it.  We really encourage it.

Okay, so our theme is “Language and Social Justice in the United States.”  The fact of the matter is that linguistic relevance has a long history.  As a matter of fact, one of the founding pioneers of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, actually [00:05:00] said that in practice, the study of language is in some degree or other the concern of everyone.  So everybody does language, in a sense.  It’s critical to everyone’s life.  And in that sense, lingua should be engaged in the lives of people that they study.

Now the other side of that is that there remains a tolerable prejudice about language.  So “Discrimination based on language variation is so commonly accepted, so widely perceived as appropriate, that it must be seen as the last back door to discrimination.  And the door stands wide open.”  People don’t always recognize that, but the fact of the matter is if you look at our diversity canon in universities, corporations, and other places, you’ll notice that language is always, or typically not mentioned.  Yet language intersects with every other component of the diversity canon, [00:06:00] and is critical to its manifestation.  So that becomes -- we also live in a state where knowledge is everywhere.  You know, no longer can I tell things, say things in class, and have students simply accept them.  They can challenge me right on the spot by looking up the facts.  Facts and knowledge are so accessible in terms of our global knowledge, that it becomes an active place for sort of inquiry and confrontation, and a total battlefield.

And in this sense, I remember Jan Blommaert, who passed away when we were just starting this.  And what we said about knowledge is a battlefield, and that “...we need an activist attitude, one in which power-through-knowledge is engaged, in which knowledge is activated as a key instrument for the liberation of people, and as a central tool underpinning [00:07:00] any effort to arrive at a more just and equitable society.”  And in a sense, I concur with that.  And that gives knowledge, and specialization in linguistics, a much deeper social relevance.

Okay, so why a collection in Daedalus?  Well first of all, as I mentioned before, language is typically dismissed or erased in the diversity canon.  And whenever I speak on this topic to universities, and I do a considerable amount of it, I always tell them, I’ll speak to the linguists, but I want the officer of diversity in your university to be there.  Because they need to hear this message and how language intersects with everything within that domain.  And there’s a breadth and scope of linguistics relevance and engagement that covers everything from political language, to the language used [00:08:00] in higher institutions, to attitudes that kids go into school with, and perpetuate throughout their schooling.

There’s also current relevance.  It’s interesting, at no point in my life, and I’ve been around 80 years, has the whole notion of truth as a linguistic question been so globally discussed.  This happened also during Watergate.  And as a matter of fact, the president of the Linguistic Society of America gave a very cogent talk which was titled for his presidential address, “Truth as a linguistic question.”  And that still remains true.  Ironically, this is the fiftieth anniversary of a volume of “Language as a Human Problem,” which was published by Daedalus in 1973, the summer issue, which is exactly [00:09:00] the same issue, 50 years.  Of course, the use of language and language inequality at that time were very different.  And as a matter of fact, there was only one or two papers.  And the papers were authored by 16 people, 15 of whom were white European women, and one white European woman.  There were no people of color represented.  So there’s a new age, a new dynamic, new presentation, and a new obligation.

Now the scope of the issue.  In a sense, it’s all over the place.  In terms of everything from language and criminal justice, to language and climate change, to linguistic colonialism, linguistic inequality in higher education, and even sort of the endangered language narratives that come with sort of the crisis of languages in the world today.  So there are volumes [00:10:00] which are much more specified and restricted.  But this is a more -- a wider and more expansive, and we hope also deeper approach to the topic.

Now, convention wisdom engagement, is not always the one that I’m endorsing here.  As a matter of fact, my colleague Noam Chomsky says, “Maybe your training just doesn’t help you to be useful to other people.  In fact, it doesn’t.”  And to that, I would say, well, there are linguists who take that position.  Ironically, Chomsky, who was highly political in other faces of his life, actually refutes that linguistics has any value.  My reply to him is that, the social engagement of linguistics, “Language is often used as a tool of social oppression.  As social beings who study language in society, we have a responsibility to address [00:11:00] language-related inequalities.  And the fact of the matter is, our professional knowledge helps us.  Particularly, in areas such as social linguistics, and other areas that pertain to language as behavior, as opposed to language as code.

Now, just to go over briefly a couple of the papers in the beginning of it.  It starts out with a very cogent argument by a group of faculty from the University of Michigan, which is on the front line, in terms of addressing inequality, they have a language policy statement.  They have a statement about standardization.  And what they noticed and observed is that language standardization involves minimizing variation, especially in the written forms of language.  In this context, what are often considered to be “trivial” peeves enhance powerful [00:12:00] ideologies, judgments about people.  So in a sense, notions about sort of correctness, and grammaticality, and proper language, versus incorrectness, ungrammatical, and improper language, are simply codes for something that is valued, and something that is dismissed and stigmatized.

And in that regard, I have to say that higher education is not simply complicit with that; it actually acts as an agent that promotes ideologies of the powerful, and disempowers those who are disenfranchised.  One of the things I like about this, is that they show the embodiment of language, where people’s physical emotions are affected by their attitudes about language.  So if you just cringed, because the wrong your was used.  Or [00:13:00] for example, if, or if grammar is spelled wrong, or something like that.  We see the physical embodiment of these, as your eyes are burning, it kills me again.  So it’s strongly embedded and in register.

So they offer what can be done, and this is in higher education, and also in secondary education and other places.  One of the things is, people who teach language, the English language, can teach students about the politics of language standardization.  It’s a perfect occasion that gets students to address some of these things.  Secondly, we can challenge the preference for standardization with the discourse of the academy.  It’s interesting that the academy has adopted such a sort of standardization code, which dismisses other varieties of language in that position.  [00:14:00] We can also, and this is important, it’s an important distinction, we can teach standardized versions of language as content, rather than correctness or incorrectness.  So if we’re teaching it as content, as a register of language that people can add to theirs, then we’re teaching it, in a sense, which understands how it’s used in certain registers, just like we might talk about the register of athletes.  We might talk about the register of writing academic articles.  So that people recognize the notion of register.  And standardization is simply another register; it’s not a matter of correctness or incorrectness.  And then of course, we can teach our students to understand and appreciate creativity, richness, and the wonder of language diversity, which is one of our greatest treasures in American culture, in the cultures in which we live, the diversity of our [00:15:00] lives.

So, my own study, which is reported here, was we took a group of students from Appalachia, and studied their opinions of their treatment as people who spoke a distinct dialect of English when they came to our university, North Carolina State University.  So we chose this group because it's a distinct different dialect.  There are a number of people from there.  And they typically have a highlands dialect that they use.

And so, what does this effect have on their college education?  Well first of all, we saw that their course participation was affected, by the perception of how they speak in class, students talking about people giggling, and feeling very uncomfortable speaking in class.  So that’s one aspect of participation.  They also [00:16:00] find that vernacular dialect adds barriers in social-academic settings.  So they need to prove that they’re intelligent.  It’s not connoted by their voice.  They need to overcome stereotypes that people who talk like that are not simply dumb hillbillies and so forth.  And the fact of the matter is, most kids who are born in one area experience diversity in a meaningful way, the first time when they come to college.  So it heightens their awareness of language stigmatization of their home dialect.  And the status of a linguistic other.

One of the things that was most surprising is that they have different experiences, and different departments and colleges.  This is interesting because we found that in the sciences, that the students feel much more comfortable speaking, that in the humanities and social science.  Now this seems to be at odds [00:17:00] with many studies that indicate that humanities professors and social science professors tend to be the most progressive and liberal I universities.  And yet these are the professors who impose these gatekeeping and standardization principles that are very stifling to students.  So we see that progressiveness does not cover all areas.  It’s quite restricted, and language is one of those areas in which higher education is still highly at fault.  So as a matter of fact, students’ sense of belonging is strongly affected by the perception of dialect.  In a sense, either they change, or they hang out with folks from where they came from.  And while it is not sort of the sole factor, the fact that folks from this area have a higher incidence of dropout rates is in some way connected to how comfortable [00:18:00] they are with their language.  I’m not saying that’s the sole reason; I don’t believe in essentialism.  So the fact of the matter are lots of things, but this is one of them.

And also, and then so from that, we decided we would study professors.  So I sent out a random sample asking professors, of a third of our professors, asking them to participate in our study, and over 80 people volunteered.  We talked to them about their own experiences.  Did people monitor them?  Where did they come from?  How did they speak?  How did they feel about their own way of speaking?  How do they feel about their students’ ways of speaking?

And we found a couple of chronotopes.  One, there’s one of a comfortably white classroom, which is normative, standard, unmarked.  Regional white language solidarity is often rewarded in that.  Well, one professor told us, “You know, I speak Southern, I’m from the South, and when I talk [00:19:00] this way, students feel very related to me, and very comfortable.”  One thing that wasn’t noticed, however, was the fact that that’s true of Southern white students.  But is it true from Americans who may come from a different area, and associate as a stereotype, Southern speech with racism?  They may feel more uncomfortable and more marginalized.  And so we see, there’s also an uncomfortably Black classroom, where Black professors are non-normative Black speech may occur in the classroom, and they feel pressure not to use it, because their intelligence is going to be judged.  So they’re facing a conundrum in who they represent, and become exceptionalized back instructors and students.  And also we see the language ideology [00:20:00] which is manifest in these kinds of classroom as well.

It also relates to male-female kinds of dimensions.  So we had many females, for examples, professors, who said that they were mentored by people in graduate school of how to speak, how to dress, how to act, which was not comparable to what men were mentored about.  So there’s a classroom flexibility that males have in the classroom, women do not have.  All right, there’s a male language use that is normative, that is much more expansive in terms of domains that it covers.  And also, it is the unmarked norm.

Now, women face a sort of double-bind.  So they’re often sanctioned for indexing femininity.  So they may have vocal fry, they may have uptalk.  And lots of women professors talked about people giving [00:21:00] them lectures and advice about using that in the classroom.  At the same time, they may be sanctioned for violating gender norm expectations.  And so they’re in a double bind where there’s multiple identities that intersect to produce a unique oppression.  So they may be sanctioned for using feminine features, and then sanctioned for violating norm expectations.  So this becomes a problem.

So what we see in terms of the diversity canon, is that language variation is a critical, symbolic manifestation of diversity.  It ironically excluded or erased from our institutional Office of Diversity Programs.  And, and this is critical, universities are central sites where linguistic subordination is reproduced and enabling, as are corporations.

Now, there are other studies in this volume [00:22:00] that actually consider other things.  So for example, one of our editors, Guadalupe Valdés’s paper, looks at heritage speakers of Spanish.  So there are common misunderstandings about long-term English speaking.  So sometimes these folks are considered to be almost “languageless,” there’s a kind of “languageless” myth.  So they speak neither English nor Spanish fluently.  And we see this sort of creation of a mythology about it.  Which has a considerable impact on their social educational lives and futures.  And she problematizes the classroom instruction, and the curricularization for Latinx students, where students are often put into this tradition of we curricularize it, and teach about the structures, but not about the social setting [00:23:00] and the status.  So she analyzed the powerful effect of teaching as an additional language across the world, and examines the levels of powerful language-teaching industry to immigrant origin students.

The final study that I’m going to consider, is really unique because it’s given by a speaker of an Indigenous language that is now considered to be extinct.  And what he takes on are some of the linguistic traditions in how we treat endangered languages.  In a sense, linguistics have become enamored with the notion of biological extinction.  And so they’ve used language as an analog to that.  But in reality, what has happened to that, is they’ve considered extinction as a sort of done deal.  [00:24:00] So languages go into extinction, and that’s the end of it.  But unlike biological species, there’s a different situation.  And in this context also, endangered languages become objects of wider society’s consumption, simply on the basis of documentation.  But not in terms of their status socio-linguistically within society.  So we have colonialist injustices that create major language shifts.  These are operative in all of the cases of Indigenous languages; we all know about the Indian schools and the punishment, and the devaluing of Indigenous language.

Now what Wes Leonard who is a speaker of a supposedly extinct language, and this is one of his points, that I speak a language that everyone calls extinct.  It’s a pushback against [00:25:00] the framing of language endangerment by linguistic documentarians.  And what he also draws from, is the Indigenous ways of knowing to promote social justice through reclamation.  And in that sense, not only do our authors fight some of the societal kinds of stereotypes in this, but some of the myths that have been created within linguistic itself.  And at this point, I’m going to turn it over to Anne Charity Hudley who is a great resource as an editor of this, and will continue with some of the overviews.  Thank you very much.

 

Anne Charity Hudley:

While if a classroom may be comfortable for a chronotype of white students, when you start then bringing in students from different backgrounds, female students, that language diversity that he documents in the paper is super important.  Well then, went on to share [00:26:00] about how we see parallels, in Guadalupe’s paper about inequality and long-term bilingual education, and thinking about common misunderstandings about the notion of English learning, and who’s doing it under what conditions.  And so we get students who are bilingual speakers of English and Spanish in particular, who are seen as “languageless,” because they are deemed long-term English learners, even though their educational, social, cultural experiences, have been dual and bilingual the whole time.  So seeing how this situation plays out for, in the NC State context, and comparing that to how Guadalupe has seen that in her work, in California and other contexts, really allows us to problematize the impact of teaching language, and teaching English, as really important, based on everyone’s origin story, whether you be an immigrant, or you see yourself as someone who is Indigenous [00:27:00] in different ways to the United States as a migrant, or someone who has a diasporic lens.  And we see how colonial injustices, especially if you turn towards an Indigenous perspective, is really emphasized in the ways that we talk about endangered languages in particular.  And Wes Leonard, in his paper, really shows how there’s a global crisis of language death and language extinction.  But focusing on the reasons why this is happening, rather than just seeing people as losing their language, allows us to push back against the framing of language endangerment that we often get currently by language documentarians.  And show the ways that Indigenous knowledge, and Indigenous practice is promoting social justice through reclamation.

And this is really important for us, through these framing papers, but also throughout the entire volume.  [00:28:00] As we work to really expand the notion of who studies language, and why.  And I [felt?] this in terms of Toni Morrison’s particular Nobel Lecture.  And she says in that lecture, “We die.  That may be the meaning of life.  But we do language, and that may be the measure of our lives.”  And so you see in this set of papers by Walt, Guadalupe and Wes, and Anne Curzan, Robin Queen and others, that doing language, and having us be measured, is super important to all of us, but particularly of those who are thinking about the ways that we study language, and the ways that we use language in the learning process.  So what I’m thinking about here, is we are not just doing language as the measure of our lives; we are doing language as a matter of survival.  And you can really see that through the authors in this volume, and the ways that we’re thinking about how language impacts our own experience, and our experiences as people who study language.

So here are some [00:29:00] examples here, right?  We are in this moment where books are being banned, and educators are afraid to broach topics, including race.  Which adds a burden for all of us, but particularly those of us in these highly-politicized areas, to figure out how do we even keep these conversations going?  And if they haven’t started yet, how do we start them?  That is also being accompanied by anti-diversity, equity and inclusion legislation, the end of affirmative action and admissions that we all should be thinking proactively about, what are our individual and collective responsibilities to this judgment.  We are facing as scholars, particularly as scholars of privilege, and scholars in the Academy and surrounding audiences, how do we stop the dismantling of generations of effort?  And I think particularly those of us who are thinking about this from a linguistic perspective are watching the greater reliance on language in the admissions process, as we try to sort out those who we think have the most opportunity [00:30:00] and access.

Linguists right now in particular are watching the devaluing of public higher education, and the closure of language and linguistics programs.  And so we’re thinking about the reality that our most vulnerable and needing students may not have the full spectrum of access to language and culture in higher education.  And so we’ve been thinking about this not just in the Daedalus collection, but in the larger study of community of people who study language.  And I really want to share how this work is ongoing and collective.  So the relationship between this volume and other volumes for us has a mission.  So in all, there are four volumes.  Two are available, and I’ll go through all of them, and two will be out soon.  And that author difference, who we are as people, from marginalize groups, from minoritized groups, from groups who have not been as active in the policy conversations, in the Academy conversations, are trying [00:31:00] not to just share the information, but figure out for ourselves what our futures will look like as scholars and researchers.

So we’re working, as we do this work, to survive protests, and pandemics, in action.  Most of this work was done during the height of COVID, where we were using this opportunity to preserve intellectual action, and to preserve community, where we had worked hard to create it.  And we feel that as Southerners, and as people from the global diaspora.  How do we keep this work moving?  And how do we keep it moving under some of the most dire circumstances that even we had ever experienced?  We even lost a co-author of our inclusion volume, Jon Henner, as we worked, right?  And so we are mourning deeply, and realistically.  But we are keeping going, because we feel like the work is important, and the community is so critical.

So the first volume in this kind of swirl of work to appear, appeared in the Annual Review of [00:32:00] Applied Linguistics.  And this was also focused on social justice in applied linguistics.  Alison Mackey is the editor, and she’s worked with me and others to really think about how do we embody justice in the practice of creating the volume, as we did the work.  And we’re going to name things we focused on, was highlight emerging scholars, assistant professors, associate professors, scholars who are not full-time tenure track faculty, but who are doing important work in all different venues.  And so what we got was a broad range of topics.  Identity construction for second and other learners, to macro-level pieces on applied linguistics, and the nature of the discipline.  And so this volume, and some of the authors appeared in both, and there’s much cross-conversation, really led us to kind of think about the relationship between al four.  And a proceedings volume from the Linguistic Society of America that I and others drafted into [00:33:00] 2018, led to the first ever statement of race from the Linguistic Society of America, which was then adopted by the association.  We drew on this statement to write a subsequent paper towards racial justice and linguistics, which inspired a set of responses about racial equity among those who study language.

And that then led to these two forthcoming volumes, the Oxford volume on inclusion in linguistics, and in decolonization in linguistics.  Which is a two-volume set that sets the framework for growth, and creates roadmaps for scholars to establish innovative research agendas teaching research outreach in ways that will help push our linguistic theory interventions where it can be more attentive to social justice, and to the work that we’re describing in the Daedalus volume.  In all of these volumes, we had a very collaborative approach in all four volumes.  We worked with scholars, we gave collaborative feedback, [00:34:00] we met with authors, again, to not only produce really strong scholarship, but to create a more just and decolonized way of doing editing in the Academy.  And we hope that the model for how this work has happened is a way for not just people who study language, but for everyone to think really critically about how do we have really action for inclusion as we go?

So I’m going to highlight some of the papers, especially fellows here who are in these cross-conversations.  So Nelson Flores and I wrote the inclusion for the Applied Linguistics volume, and you see his work here with Jonathan Rosa in the Daedalus volume, really emphasizing in their paper rethinking language barriers and social justice from a racial linguistic perspective, the need for radically reimagined theories of language, change and practice, challenging colonial and imperial histories and legacies, but also capitalist [00:35:00] powers that continually reproduce disparity, dispossession, and disposability.  You see Jonathan here in action with students in a K-12 environment talking about these issues, and [we’ve been?] thinking here, at Stanford GSE, and among many of the authors about how we make this work manifest in schools before students even get to higher education.

Aris Clemons and Jessie Grieser extend this model into specifically thinking about racial linguistics with respect to Black womanhood, and how can those who study language really be informed by work in gender, sexuality studies, as well as the theme of intersections of race, sexual identity, and social status.  They press us to refuse traditional boundaries about social categories, and privilege us to get messy, to think about complexities, over the simplified kind of ways that we might think about [00:36:00] static categories in the human condition.  And they really emphasize how language provides us with both an empirical and a comprehensive tool to interrogate not just individual identities, but the ways that we use communications to make sense between the intersections of these identities.

Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee, Andrew Cheng, and Anusha Anand take this into the model of thinking about how Asian Americans are racialized, and how these model minority logics manifest both in linguistics and related areas.  They really push us to think about how Asian identity is celebrated, but also made invisible in education contexts, and how it’s kind of also been marshaled in terms of a, what they call a “neoliberal multiculturalism” that denies institutions the responsibility to support Asian American students, [00:37:00] and all of their cultural, linguistic, and social identities.

Samy Alim’s paper, “Inventing the ‘White Voice’: Racial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies” shows us how in popular media and in representations, we have both a sociological, a cultural, and media imagination of “white voice.”  He shows how this particularly comes to the screen in Sorry to Bother You, and how individuals, in this example, Black male individuals, every day make linguistic choices that are, as I mentioned earlier, key for survival, but may be also soul-murdering.  The decisions that you make about what voice you use when you’re pulled over by police officers.  The voices that you make, you decide to use when you go for a job interview.  When you’re really thinking about how you’re performing linguistic [00:38:00] versions of yourself, but also linguistic versions of whiteness, that sometimes aren’t even accurate for the people who you are interacting with, right?  So the state of the imaginary, the state of the performed.  We’ll start to see that in the next couple of papers, and how this is manifest in the everyday lives of people.

John Baugh gives us really specific examples of this, in his work on linguistic profiling across international geopolitical landscapes.  He shows that in housing markets, both in the United States, but in across the world, languages and language varieties that are denigrated go right along with who also is kept outside of the main housing market.  So he shows that in German cities, just like he found in his research in the United States, callers who had Turkish names were less likely to be granted an appointment to view properties, than were callers with Anglo-American names.  And so [00:39:00] he shows, right, that these principles are universal.  Our solutions probably will have to be international and diasporic in ends.  And that there’s work to do here in the United States, but all over the world.

Sharese King and John Rickford give a very specific example of language on trial.  They profiled the complete challenges in our criminal justice system, as exemplified by Rachel Jeantel in her testimony on behalf of her friend Trayvon Martin.  They showed how the jurors did not even have the materials to reread or understand Rachel Jeantel’s testimony or the subsequent transcripts.  They talk about how jurors and others frankly saw her use of language varieties, mix of different back diasporic varieties, as something that is incredible, sometimes unintelligible.  [00:40:00] And they really show what would need to happen step-by-step in the justice system to truly take language more fully into account.

We end the volume with a model that really is inspired by my frameworks of thinking about what the point of all of this work is.  Who does it benefit, individually and collectively?  And how the community work, the hard work, the challenging work, and the work that’s been challenged sometimes right now in linguistics, can set forth a model for us for liberation.  Three aspects of the model that are really important is to think about how all of this really hard work was created, and how it can be passed along to scholars in the future.

So, I have a picture here by Raven Pierce, a student at the College of William and Mary where I used to teach, really thinking about this really visceral, in a colonial context, use of knowledge as liberation.  And for me, this has really [00:41:00] been important.  My work has been really greatly and heavily funded by the National Science Foundation, also some by the National Institutes of Health.  And so we can think of liberation following these models, right?  There’s mandates for broadening participation; there’s mandates for inclusion along funding models that then speak to people, okay, this is important, because this is inclusion.  If we want to do work that’s funded and respected by these agencies, this is what we need to do.

We’ve seen some success with this, but many people have argued, including me, that this success, while great, is still incremental.  If we want to get serious about liberation across the Academy, especially with respect to language, we’re going to have to think about valuing the identity, the culture, the races, and lived experiences of people from minoritized groups that emphasize social justice, not just as an aspect of research, an aspect of higher education, but something that we need to push to the forefront, that [00:42:00] values the intellectual questions that we as scholars have.

Realistically, the third part of this model I think is going to happen if we really challenge ourselves to work in partnership with people from the communities that we really wish to support, and study, and document.  And many of those scholars for us in linguistics right now may be in neighboring research areas.  So many of our larger PhD programs in linguistics don’t necessarily have very diverse faculties yet, is the way I think about it.  But if we work with our colleagues on our campuses, if we work with scholars in neighboring areas, we will be able to create research that not is just representative of people from different groups, but invites them in, that makes them want to be part of these conversations, these discussions, and makes liberatory linguistics authentic in partnership.

And so, I come back [00:43:00] to Toni Morrison’s noble address to think about this, because what we’re calling for in this volume, what is justice in our sense, is going to be lovely work, work that we are doing together.  So my photos here represent some of the students that I’ve worked with over time, my current lab members, as well as conversations that have been really supported by the Linguistics Society of America, and other institutions to think about what that work can be.

So now we’ll have two featured papers that will go more in-depth about what this justice looks like.  And the first will be from Norma Mendoza-Denton.  Her paper in the volume is entitled “Currents of Innuendo Converge on an American Path to Political Hate.”  And then our second paper will be delivery by Julia Coombs Fine, who will be representing Jessica Love-Nichols, and Bernard Perley, her coauthors.  And that paper is entitled, “Climate and Language: An Entangled Crisis.”  [00:44:00]

So I’ll stop now and turn it over to Norma.

 

Norma Mendoza-Denton:

Thank you to Anne, to Walt, and to Guadalupe for putting together this tremendous volume, and also to the American Academy, and specifically also to the editors of Daedalus, who have been very generous and kind in allowing us to come at them with all of this different kind of work.  I know, especially my work is definitely of the nerdy variety, so it took some editing to get all the charts right.  I won’t be going into absolutely everything that was covered, of course, in the paper.  But just one little piece of it, so that it can give you a taste of what we’re trying to do.  So you know, sometimes in linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, where I’m located, in the nexus between sociolinguistics and linguistic [00:45:00] anthropology, we work with students, we, as Anne has done, you know, lead labs that are engaged in promoting the work of our colleagues.  And sometimes we just dial into the nitty-gritty of discourse itself.

So my paper has been about innuendo.  And this includes enthymemes, sarcasm, and dogwhistles.  But I’m not going to go into all of this; I’ll leave that for you to recover from the paper.  And the history of all of this.  But I just want to give you a very brief idea of the fact that this has been going on for a long time.  And this is not, of course, George Bush’s speech through the State of Union; it’s not the very first time that this type of dogwhistle-slash-enthymeme was issued, [00:46:00] but it’s definitely very prominent in the political literature, so I’ll just read this to you.  From George W. Bush’s State of the Union Speech:

“For so many in our country -- the homeless, the fatherless, the addicted, the need is great.  Yet there is power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people.  I urge you to pass both my faith-based initiative and the Citizen Service Act to encourage acts of compassion that can transform America, one heart and one soul at a time.”

So this is the beginning of former President Bush’s compassionate conservatism, if you recall.  And political scientist Bethany Anderson probed the interpretation of this phrase, “wonder-working power.”  And this comes from a hymn, a religious hymn.  And she found that although most of the college students that she interviewed [00:47:00] did not get the reference, a great proportion of Pentecostals did.  So, this “wonder-working power” was definitely bifurcated, interpretatively bifurcated, serving as a kind of dogwhistle, where if you knew the reference to this church hymn, you would get that it was supposed to be a religious speech.  But if you didn’t, it just sounds like political, basically like political speech.  And so, I was interested in this bifurcation of a message, how you could say something and at the same time, be able to not say it.

So, my definition of innuendo is close to Elisabeth Camp’s -- she’s a philosopher -- communication of beliefs, requests, and other attitudes ‘off-record’, so that the speaker’s main communicative point remains unstated.  [00:48:00] And here I’m going to consider innuendo be the superordinate category that includes dogwhistles, sarcasm, and other kinds of strategic indirectness.

And the reason that this is important, and I’m going to highlight this for our listeners, is that linguistics can often provide a lot of really great tools for understanding the discourse that surrounds us.  So for example, a politician may be able to tell you that they think something, and at the same time, be putting out a different message to different constituencies.  So, of course this is not new in politics; there have been many studies of innuendo and dogwhistles in different political systems.  But I wanted to drill down on this at the intonational level.  So I’m going to give you an example of former President Trump, when he had a [00:49:00] rally at Bemidji in Minnesota, and spoke about refugees.  So I’m not going to play you the data, as we would normally do at a talk, because that will just take too long, but I’m just going to read it to you.

“One of the most vital issues in this election is the subject of refugees.  You know it, you know it perhaps better than almost anybody.  Lots of luck.  You’re having a good time ... with your refugees?  That’s good.  We want to have...” and somebody says, “Ilhan Omar!”  And he says, “Omar, he said Omar!”  “Boo, boo!”  “That’s a beauty.”  “Boo.”

So what does this look like to -- I mean, all of us can hear possibly the sarcasm.  But to a linguist, this looks like a time that one might be able to dive down into deeper analysis.  And trying to understand exactly how it is that we can have all of these interpretations, because if you just look at the text, [00:50:00] if you look at the text of what was said, you’re not going to be able to get some of the interpretations that were recovered by the listeners.  So, having this low-star, low-boundary-tone ending in the, “That’s good,” has been probed by conversation analysts, by computer scientists, as a way of automatically detecting sarcasm.  So if you say “that’s good,” with a very, very low tone at the end, in this kind of phrase, that cues the listener to sarcasm.

Another way to do it is with intonational prominence.  “How the hell did SHE win the election?  How did she WIN?”  And he’s again talking about Ilhan Omar.  And here we [00:51:00] have the variously-implemented use of this intonational prominence to essentially cue people that, to cue the listener that he means to recover other interpretations.  How did she, and not somebody else, win the election?  How did she win and not lose?  And all of these are powerfully coded.  And of course, we might be tempted to think that this is done strategically.  And in some ways it is strategic.  But it’s also something that former President Trump does extremely -- he’s just like an incredible speaker in this particular way.  And just being able to invoke dogwhistles, invoke innuendo, and invoke them in a way that he still has plausible deniability when directly questioned.  And again, for me the purpose of this is to [00:52:00] be able to look at dominant discourses, and break them down, and essentially to give citizens the tools that they need to uncover the possibility of political hate.  Thank you.

 

Julia C. Fine:

Thanks so much for that presentation, and I echo the thanks to the organizers as well.  All right, so I’m presenting on behalf of myself, Jessie Love-Nichols, and Bernie Perley today.  And title of our chapter is, “Climate and Language: An Entangled Crisis.”  So I’ll be trying to tease apart some of these tangles quickly.  And of the themes in this volume that Wes Leonard also raised is not economic pressure is naturalized as a cause of Indigenous language shift.  And just framed as business as usual, a natural consequence of modernization and globalization.  But if you think about it, economic pressure doesn’t need to result in language shift.  It could result [00:53:00] in multilingualism.  And even if you accept that economic pressure can cause indigenous language shift, it’s not really the root cause.  A root cause for economic pressure could in turn be the theft of land and resources.  So in my experience, I did my graduate research with the Kodiak-Alutiiq language reclamation community in Kodiak, Alaska.  And there, there’s a history of streams being dammed up so that people could no longer subsist via fishing.  And outside corporations would come in and take all their fish.  And that caused what Carruthers call the “acing out of the young” from the fishing industry and makes it difficult to support yourself locally.  And this of course can in turn trade back to colonialism and capitalism and the nexus of those two beasts.

Theft of land and resources meanwhile, often leads to misuse of land and resources.  That can look like overfishing.  It can look, [00:54:00] in the case of fossil fuel exploitation, like irresponsible fracking and pipeline leaks and all of these other harmful consequences that we see from that industry.  Perhaps the most harmful consequence of all is the climate crisis that’s been caused by burning fossil fuels, which in turn has ramifications on several other of these problems in a feedback loop.  So the climate crisis can actually drive the theft of land and resources itself, because in the wake of environmental disasters, we see what Naomi Klein terms, “disaster capitalism,” where outside corporations will come in and try and buy up real estate, while people are displaced in the wake of the disaster.  And we actually have seen this happening recently with the tragic wildfires in Maui.  Local residents, including Native Hawaiians were displaced, and now real estate companies are trying to swoop in and buy up their land.  The climate crisis [00:55:00] can also lead to Indigenous language shift by dislocating communities, and by creating these ever more frequent environmental disasters that get in the way of the community organizing needed to maintain a language movement.  Moreover, the climate crisis increases the frequency of pandemics like COVID-19, because animal migration patterns change due to rising temperatures and habitat loss.  And that additional contact between species that don’t usually get in touch with each other creates opportunities for pathogen spread.

So this is kind of the network, entangled problems that we have to deal with.  But fortunately, the solutions can build on each other in a similar kind of tangled web.  So language reclamation could actually lead to economic security in that when there are opportunities to get a job using language skills, that could allow people to remain in communities, particularly rural communities, where otherwise they would feel pressure to move [00:56:00] away in order to seek work.  And economic security, in turn, can lead to the reclamation of land and resources, for instance, through legal battles, as can language reclamation itself, because it creates a community organizing network that can [be used?] for these other kinds of decolonial projects. 

Furthermore, each of these factors in turn, contributes to, and really constitutes decolonization.  Reclamation of land and resources can then lead to responsibility because it’s management, you may have heard the statistic that 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity is currently stewarded by Indigenous peoples.  And then, responsible ecosystem management in turn leads to climate justice, both in a kind of mechanistic way, because ecosystems, like forest and wetlands and the ocean are carbon sinks.  So they sequester CO2 from the air and prevent it from continuing the warming cycle.  [00:57:00] And it’s also a form of climate justice in that it’s Indigenous sovereignty over land.  Climate justice then in turn results in fewer pandemics by stabilizing animal migration patterns.  And it also benefits language movements in that you no longer have to contend with these ongoing environmental disasters to the same degree.

But you’ll notice that arrow is two-sided, because Indigenous language reclamation actually also benefits climate justice.  As for why this is, well one reason is that progress climate activists tend to at this moment be looking for ways to express and think about concepts in an anti-capitalist, anti-extractivist light, and trying to envision when we say, “another world is possible,” exactly what that world could look like, and what it would feel like to live in it.

So as part of that reshaping thought, progressive climate movements are trying to come up with new terms for how to express [00:58:00] both the climate crisis, and climate solutions.  One interesting example of this is called, An Ecotopian Lexicon.  This is from the University of Minnesota Press.  And it consists of a range of borrowings and neologisms from varied sources, including fiction, but also including languages and including Indigenous languages.  So this creates a potential tension, because as you know if you’re familiar with Jane Hill’s work, or Jenny Davis’s work on how endangered language discourses tend to valorize Indigenous languages in a way that makes it sound like colonial people and white people in particular have ownership over them.  There’s a same tension and possibility here for these borrowings to be done in an appropriated way, and actually, to their credit, the editors caution against this, saying, “Borrowing, however conscientious, carries the risk of cultural appropriation, especially because English [00:59:00] speakers have been, and continue to be responsible for staggering material and cultural theft from Indigenous peoples and people of color.  With this history firmly in mind, we believe it is crucial to learn from and think with other cultures and subcultures in these perilous years.”

And this is evident even in discourses today about Indigenous environmental knowledge.  If you look at official documents, you’ll see a lot of settler environmental movements saying things like, oh we should incorporate Indigenous environmental knowledge into our programming and our resources and our plans for the future.  But they’re sort of assuming that that knowledge is there for the taking.  And in its worst form, this can look like settler environmental and climate activists kind of grasping at Indigenous knowledge and language and culture as a lifeline to save them from the climate crisis, which is like, an astonishing level of entitlement.

So, as an alternative to this sort of settler-dominated approach that assumes Indigenous [01:00:00] knowledge is their property, it’s possible to conceive of a world in which Indigenous frameworks could be the norm, and then settler knowledges could be slotted into those frameworks.  And I’m thinking here of what Eriel Tchekwie Deranger mentions on her website; she’s the Executive Director of the Indigenous Climate Action organization.  And she notes that her work “envisions a world where Indigenous-led climate solutions are the standard, and where colonial structures are doing the work to figure out where their resources and knowledge can offer support to existing Indigenous systems, not the other way around.  This will require a deconstruction and undoing of current systems to create space for our own independent processes, and plans built around a more holistic, interconnected, balanced approach based on reciprocity and respect with the natural world.”

So in conclusion, Bernie, Jessie and I thought about how settler climate activists can more respectfully [01:01:00] engage with Indigenous language culture, and environmental knowledge, recognize the face of that knowledge, culture, and leadership at the forefront of climate movements.

So these are some tips, not definitive or exhaustive, but to get the conversation started.  One important thing is to name colonialism as the driver behind Indigenous [language death?], and in large part behind the climate crisis itself.  Secondly, we recommend supporting Indigenous-led initiatives in terms of language reclamation activities, and also in terms of climate activism like the kinds of land and water defense that we’ve seen around the US.  We also recommend acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty over language, culture, knowledge, and land.  And finally, citing Indigenous thinkers, both within and outside [the Academy?].

Thanks so much, and I look forward to continuing the discussion.

 

Guadalupe Valdés:

This has been wonderful, and [01:02:00] so much, thank you so much for our authors and our presenters for sharing with us their thoughts.  We have a number of questions that we’d like to ask our panelists, and possibly the editors of the volume.  So our first question would be, why is it that linguistic discrimination and prejudice persists without as much public feedback in comparison to other kinds of injustices?  And I’m going to direct that to Anne.

 

Anne Charity Hudley:

Thanks, Guadalupe.  I think that’s such an important framing question.  I think what’s happened has been multi-faceted.  So you have on the policy side, in education and government policy, arguments towards a standard, arguments towards standardization, as seen as being very nationalistic, really important to the identities of not just individuals or individual cultures, but to countries, right?  So we have academies in certain countries.  We have language here, [01:03:00] pushes towards English-only, both in government legislation, but also in the workplace.  And it’s made people really think about, language is something you give up, in our instance, to be American, right?  So we still have this historical specter over us when it comes to thinking about language diversity, and the value of including it.

I think second to that, you then also get in-community arguments that are really difficult and challenging.  Internalized racism is real, and internalized linguicism is real.  And after all these years of practice of people telling you that your language isn’t important, you learn to speak English because it’s American, people have taken those values on and said look, if I have to deal with all types of discrimination, if I want to kind of make sure, ensure that I’m successful, me or my families, there’s groups of people who really believe monolingualism, monovarietalism with English, is something [01:04:00] that they will have to do as a compromise.  So they understand that their language has value.  They understand that their variety has value.  But in the greater scope of things, that has often been something that says, you know what, we’re going to go with standardized English, or English, because we’ve got a whole host of economic, socioeconomic challenges, people who are really against our very being.  This is something we can do.

And it’s really tough, because engaging with that population, which has really been a lot my work, has to understand the sensitivities of how this institutionalized, and this larger rhetoric of ignoring your language for the sake of others, really becomes a way to manifest your silence, a way for you to give up parts of your key identity.  Having people focus on language as culture, language as who they are, right, is less important, if you just really say, okay, well if I want to go to this university, or if I want to get this certain job, you now, I’m going to do it a certain way, without seeing [01:05:00] how this leads us down the slippery slope.  And I think this is really why language has not been at the forefront.  So many of us have had to do it to be successful.  So many of us continue to grapple with the fact that even as linguists, while we study different languages and different varieties, the book of our own work is in standardized English.  So it’s not just individuals in the community that are making sense of this devaluation; it’s scholars ourselves.  And how do we make sense of that as we go forward I think is really where this volume leads us.

 

Guadalupe Valdés:

Thank you, Anne.  So we have another really important question I think, and it’s really, and I’ll address it to see which one of our panelists want to answer it.  But it goes like this: how does this special issue allow us to think differently about language, linguistics, and what is the role of interdisciplinarity here?

 

Norma Mendoza-Denton:

I’ll take it.  The role of interdisciplinarity is just absolutely critical.  One thing that [01:06:00] I think has possibly hurt linguistics in the past, is the siloization of our knowledge.  So it’s, you know, it’s difficult to get people from the public interested in linguistics, if it’s perceived of and presented as a kind of autonomous science that nothing else matters to, right?  So when we have people, even from linguistics saying, this is not linguistics, that is not linguistics, that really does a disservice.  Because it doesn’t allow students who don’t see these boundaries in the first place to engage all of the different things that linguistics is able to do.  For my part, I trained in linguistics.  Actually, Professor Guadalupe-Valdés was on my dissertation committee.  And I have been in Spanish departments; I’ve been affiliated with gender studies.  [01:07:00] I’ve been very fortunate to work with people from English, and education.  And I’m currently in anthropology.  But I really see that as, I mean, I love anthropology, but I see that as a kind of like, I’m alighting in anthropology, right?  Because I’m really able to spam a lot of different subdisciplines.  So for my current work, I talk to a lot of political theorists; I talk to a lot of sociologists.  I talk to a lot of psychologists, because I’m interested in citizenry, populism, and political hate.  So that doesn’t have disciplinary boundaries.  So I think, depending on the kind of work that you’re doing, you’re at least going to have to, I guess, interface with the people in that specific area.

 

Guadalupe Valdés:

Thank you, Norma.  And we just had a question in the chat that came up, which is how would you advise federal agencies conducting Section 106 processes during [01:08:00] federal projects on their overuse and reliance on legal English, and lack of consideration for utilizing Indigenous languages, and an unwillingness to learn local tribal phrases during the Section 106 process.  And perhaps Julia wants to join us for that response.

 

Julia C. Fine:

Yeah, honestly, that sounds like something I know nothing about.  (laughs) It sounds technical.  So I’ll turn it over to anyone else who happens to know about this.  I mean, it seems like the federal agencies should have greater consideration for using Indigenous language, but I don’t know much beyond that.

 

Guadalupe Valdés:

No, that’s fair.  It’s a wonderful question.  What’s wonderful is that it came up, and we can see what do we need to know to be able to respond to that question in the future.  Because that’s certainly very, very important.  Federal agencies and the policies that they come up with, [01:09:00] change the lives of our youngsters, of our future, of all the things that we care about.  So we have to really be attentive to them.  There’s a final question here, I think that I think we want to make sure, perhaps Walt wants to come in on.  This was a question that one of our authors asked.  How do we respond to those criticisms that language and social justice is not linguistics?

 

Walt Wolfram:

I can only turn to sort of the pioneers, like de Saussure, who said that it’s part of every person’s life, and therefore not to know about it, and not to apply it to social justice is a great disservice.  I mean, look at the canon of social justice.  Look at it in terms of gender, in terms of social class, in terms of race, in terms of ethnicity.  All of these [01:10:00] are affected by language.  Language is central to our hierarchies, and serves as a basis for discriminating against people.  So to have knowledge, knowledge that we have scientifically in terms of social science, in terms of humanity, and not utilize it to the betterment of society, to me, is irresponsible.  And well, folks can study whatever they want for the sake of study.  My own feeling is, that’s what makes life worthwhile as an academic, to apply to these things.

 

Guadalupe Valdés:

Thank you.  So last words, Anne, on this topic, or any other.  Because we’re getting very close.

 

Anne Charity Hudley:

Yeah, just a last word.  I think we’re seeing this process come relevant in all disciplines right now.  As I talk about in my paper, once you start including the values of Black scholars, [01:11:00] of Latinx scholars, of Indigenous scholars in the conversation, what do we care about most?  What’s really important for our survival and sustenance?  We keep getting this rigorous.  Oh, it’s not rigorous work.  Oh, that’s not the questions that founded this discipline.  And I think what I think about every day to keep me going is well we weren’t in those discussions, when people said, what is linguistics, right?  We weren’t the early editors.  We weren’t the early formulators of the legislation, about the question was formed on, or the priorities of funding agencies.  But we’re here now.  And I think to always press against kind of this sense of what a discipline is, has to really go up against, looking at who the population of the world is, and thinking about what those needs are, and what we can do as academics every day to start making those changes appear in our teaching and research, and press ourselves to change the definition, as one of the most kind of progressive intellectual exercises that we can do.

So [01:12:00] these questions about what is linguistics, it’s going on with what is psychology?  What is education?  What is math right now, when you bring in math education and the social/cultural lives of students who one day could be mathematicians?  It runs parallel.  And so the only way to really address it and dismiss it, is in that parallel aspect.  And I think this volume gives us a roadmap for doing that.

 

Guadalupe Valdés:

We have two minutes left, and I’m seeing Aris who just turned on her camera.  I wonder if she would like to contribute something before we end.

 

Aris Clemons:

Yeah, I just wanted to add something in terms of the work that we do in kind of defining linguistics.  And I think that what we can do is continue to challenge the boundaries of what has been considered linguistics, theoretically, methodologically, and in terms of the communities that we’re privileging and working with.  I think it also comes from [01:13:00] training and recruiting a crop of students who are interested in exploring questions that are not traditionally explored, and linguistics, and doing them from a linguistics framework.  And so, I would say that continuing to do the work is what is going to allow us to re-define linguistics as it currently exists.

 

Guadalupe Valdés:

Thank you for that.  And I think we’re just at about time to end.  So, I’m going to turn it over.

 

David Oxtoby:

Thank you very much.  I want to thank Anne, Guadalupe, and Walt for leading us today in such an engaging conversation, and again for their leadership of this Daedalus volume.  And thank you to everyone in our audience for joining us.  As a reminder, the Daedalus issue on Language and Social Justice in the United States is available open access on the Academy’s website.  I hope you will continue to engage with this work, and share the essays with colleagues, students, and friends.  Thank you again for joining us, and have a good evening.  [01:14:00]