Standardization, Racialization, Language

Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies across Communicative Contexts Jonathan Rosa

racialized ideologies of languagelessness call into question linguistic compe- tence—and, by extension, legitimate personhood—altogether

their language use and personhood are racialized similarly—that is, perceived as having no legitimate place within the nation-state.

“culture of monoglot standardization,” which is linked to long-standing Enlighten- ment ideologies that presume the primordiality of the one language-one nation-one people construct (Bauman and Briggs 2003).

Hill argues that these linguistic inequalities are central to the everyday enactment of “white racism” (2008), as well as the reproduction of “white public space,” which is “a morally significant set of contexts that are the most important sites of the practices of a racializing hegemony, in which Whites are invisibly normal, and in which racialized populations are visibly marginal and the objects of monitoring ranging from individual judgment to Official English legislation” (1998:682).

Silverstein’s (2003:535) conical model of standardization and stratification in which “top-and-center folks can look down- ward-and-outward, as it were, toward peripheries at various degrees of negatively valued deviation from their imagined full-time, default, or unmarked identity.”