The Conceptualization of Language Legitimacy

Abstract

The concept ‘language legitimacy’, which entails issues of social class, ethnicity and culture as well as those of dominance and power, is a very important one with implications for both educational policy and practice. This article begins with a brief discussion of the two major ways in which the concept of ‘language legitimacy’ has been used in the scholarly literature (i.e., sociologically and linguistically), and while recognizing the validity of both approaches, emphasizes the significance of the linguistic understanding of the concept. It then provides a critique of manifestations of ‘language legitimacy’ in educational discourse, arguing that the underlying assumptions of the concept are not defensible. Finally, it raises the question of the implications of ‘language legitimacy’ for the linguistic human rights of students

Notes

¹ On December 18, 1996, the Oakland, California, Unified School District Board of Education passed a resolution (No. $597-0063) which recognized AAE as a language, and called for the development of a program designed to address the special linguistic needs of speakers of AAE in the Oakland public schools. The resolution quickly became incredibly controversial nationwide, and was attacked from a variety of perspectives. Although the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) both issued statements supporting the basic claims in the resolution, the popular response was extremely negative, and the Board ultimately passed a revised, and somewhat more moderate, resolution on January 15, 1997. The response to the Oakland resolution was remarkably similar to that which emerged in response to the earlier judicial decision in Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District (1979) (see Smitherman, 1981).

² The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) includes more than 160 distinct phonemes.

³ Phonemes are generally defined as the smallest units of sound in a language and are thus the fundamental items used in the analysis of mophemes and lexemes. In signed languages, however, such a definition is obviously inappropriate. In such languages, individual signs are typically analyzed in terms of handshape, palm orientation, movement, location, and non-manual features, which are called either phonemes or sometimes “cheremes” (see Valli, Lucas, Mulrooney, & Villanueva, 2011).

⁴ Rotokas is spoken by under 5,000 people on Bougainville, an island east of New Guinea. It has three dialects (Central Rotokas, Aita Rotokas, and Pipipaia). It is best known for its extremely small phoneme inventory (see Robinson, 2006).

⁵ !Xũ is a Southern Khoesan language spoken by around 500 people in southern Africa (see Heikkinen, 1986; Snyman, 1973).

⁶ There is a problem in many instances in defining what actually constitutes a “word.” For instance, in Spanish, do the various conjugated forms of a verb (e.g., hablo, hablas, habla, etc.) constitute distinct words, or should only the base form (habl-) term be counted? Do singular and plural forms of nouns count as separate words (ox and oxen, book and books, and so on)? How do prefixes and suffixes count? What about compound words? The way in which we answer these questions will dramatically impact the “size” of the lexicon of a language.

⁷ Aspect is a grammatical category that is used to distinguish how an action, event or state of being, as indicated by a verb, is related to the passage of time. The relative importance of aspect, versus tense, varies from language to language (some languages lack aspect altogether, while others lack tense) (see Comrie, 1976). Although English does utilize aspect, the aspectual system in AAE is far more complex than in standard English (see Green, 2002, 2011).

⁸ “He be around” in AAE uses the habitual aspect; the be indicates that this is a general, on-going state (i.e., the he is usually around), but does not comment on his presence at the moment.

⁹ For an excellent overview of comparative Indo-European linguistics, see Beekes (2011).

¹⁰ There is some dispute about the actual number of phonemes in Pirahã. If one takes into account the tonal system of the language, then the total number of phonemes may be at least 12 (see Sheldon, 1988).

¹¹ There appear to be three basic personal pronouns in Pirahã: ti (first person, singular and plural), gi or gíxai (second person), and hi (third person), through there are a number of other pronouns that have been documented. The other pronominal forms, though, do not exist independently, and may actually be nouns rather than pronouns. Everett has suggested that the entire set of personal pronouns in Pirahã may actually have been borrowed from Nheengatu, a Tupi-based lingua franca.

¹² In his earlier work, Everett originally identified a number of color terms in Pirahã, but has since revisited these claims and argued that they are not color terms so much as descriptive phrases (“like blood” for red, for instance).

¹³ From a linguistic perspective, one of Everett's most important claims is that Pirahã lacks recursion (e.g., “Sam said that Mary said that John was at home”). Everett has asserted that this is a direct challenge to Chomskian linguistics, and if true, it would falsify the foundations of Chomskian linguistics (Everett, 2009). A number of linguists have denied Everett's basic claim that Pirahã does in fact lack recursion (see Nevins, Pesetsky, & Rodrigues, 2009), and Chomsky has, further, denied that even if true, this would falsify Chomskian linguistics.

¹⁴ See Nevins et al. (2009) for a very powerful critique of Everett's claims. His response to their criticisms is provided in Everett (2009).