Introduction to special issue: linguistic racism

ABSTRACT

Papers in this Special Issue, “Linguistic Racism”, focus on the phenomenon of linguistic racism – the ideologies and practices that are utilised to conform, normalise and reformulate an unequal and uneven linguistic power between language users (Skutnabb-Kangas 2015) – directed at culturally and linguistically different (CaLD) or Indigenous backgrounds around the globe. The authors provide multiple ethnographic studies to understand what it means to speak as a racialised subject in the highly diverse societies of the twenty-first century, examining the manners in which one’s fundamental human rights are violated, and how one is deprived of both socio-economic and socio-cultural opportunities as a result of their use of language. All of the articles acknowledge the multiple, complex layers of cause and effect that further entrenches linguistic racism into particular social, cultural, ethnic, national and educational contexts that (re)shape the minoritised bilingual speakers’ linguistic practices. The Special Issue addresses the effects of critical approaches to current bilingualism theories that break new ground by disclosing the reality that it is not always applicable to commend bilingual diversity without fully acknowledging ongoing, often profoundly entrenched, local constraints.

KEYWORDS:

• linguistic racism
• culturally and linguistically different (CaLD) speakers
• international students
• Indigenous speakers
• bilingual education

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all authors for their invaluable contributions to this Special Issue. My gratitude goes to the Editor-in-Chief of this journal, Li Wei, for his enduring support. Special thanks go to Peter De Costa for his contribution of an afterword. I am grateful to peer reviewers for carefully reviewing the articles for this Special Issue. I wish to acknowledge Kelly Bailey’s hard work on copy-editing this paper. This work was also supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) [grant number DE180100118].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Dr. Sender Dovchin is a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Education, Curtin University, Australia. She has published her works in bi/multilingual education and sociolinguistics in numerous international peer-reviewed journals. Her monograph, ‘Language, Media and Globalization in the Periphery’ was published in 2019 by Routledge.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was also supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) [grant number DE180100118].