Language and Racism from a Global Perspective

From the United States and Europe to the Global South, linguistic anthropologists explore language and racism as deeply intertwined phenomena that manifest in diverse forms and across different sociopolitical contexts. In the United States, where this research field is most developed, theories on language, race, and racism have evolved with the country’s lengthy history of slavery and racial segregation. Linguistic anthropologists working in the domains of sociocultural linguistics, Black linguistics, and raciolinguistics have examined how language perpetuates racial hierarchies, from the stigmatization of African American Vernacular English to the linguistic profiling of racial minorities. In Europe, a continent marked by colonial imperialism, the Holocaust of World War II, and the ensuing taboo of race, theories on language and racism have developed in varying ways and only relatively recently, in the early 2000s, emerged in most non-English-speaking countries. Research on language and racism has long been difficult to conduct in “colorblind” countries such as France because of the hegemonic discourses of universalism, republicanism, and linguistic-cultural assimilation. Although the official rhetoric stresses equality and secularism, social scientists have addressed the ambivalence of the French Republic’s universalist ideology, as it can mask systemic racism and reinforce Whiteness as the unmarked norm, thus excluding racial minorities from the national narrative. The French context thus highlights the complexities of studying language and racism within colorblind White supremacies. In the Global South, including regions such as Latin America and South Africa, researchers have developed new epistemologies that cast doubt on the methodologies and colonizing concepts of Western countries for the study of language and racism. The collective Modernity/Coloniality-Decoloniality project, which brings together researchers from Latin America and the Caribbean, explores the implications of an epistemic “Decolonial Turn” in which the perspectives and life experiences of people from the Global South are regarded as points of departure to make a critique of the failures of Eurocentric modernity. African linguistic scholars have also developed a decolonial linguistic approach to racism, which critically engages with the history of the discipline by addressing its deep entanglements with colonial knowledge production. They often adopt a raciolinguistic framework that converges with Black linguistic theory from a southern perspective. In South Africa, scholars illustrate how language practices are imbued with the legacy of apartheid and persistent racial hierarchies that perpetuate the domination of English and the marginalization of Indigenous languages. This body of research on language and racism sheds light on the global and local processes through which language both reproduces and challenges systems of racial inequality in White supremacies across the globe

Colonialism · Eurocentrism · Hegemony · Racism · Rhetoric · Sociocultural evolution · Taboo

• Language and Political Economy

  Alfonso Del Percio, Mi-Cha Flubacher et al.•Oxford Handbook of Language and…•2016

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