Global Perspectives on the Language Rights Debate

• In Event: Reexamining the Language Rights Debate: Historical, Global, and Contemporary Perspectives

Abstract

In this second presentation, I will contextualize the notion of language rights, which has traditionally been focused on the United States, from a perspective that considers the global processes that have shaped this debate. For this purpose, I will examine theoretical frameworks that have thus far been largely absent from discussions on the language rights of culturally and linguistically diverse students. I will argue that discussions about language rights should be situated alongside discussions of settler colonialism and diaspora. African American Vernacular English (AAVE), for example, is clearly rooted in West African language families (Winford, 1997; Rickford, 1998), which is one of many reasons for which a global perspective on language rights could reshape the conversation from a more localized to a transnational perspective.

The notion that students deserve a right to their own language (Kinloch, 2010), then should be connected to desubjugation of knowledges that are produced and reproduced through languages that counter dominant ways of knowing and speaking. This can only be done when taking into consideration the legacy of empire and settler colonialism, which continue to shape race relations and educational practices in the contemporary moment (Dei, 2006; Ives, 2009).
There are vast theoretical potentials with numerous practical implications when frameworks, such as New Literacy Studies are brought into conversation with anti-colonial theory and diaspora studies, in order to examine the language and literacy practices of marginalized youth as they are connected to global hegemonies. The focus of New Literacy Studies on power and the social, cultural, historical, and educational contexts in which educational processes occur, paired with notions of voice, the colonial gaze, and the push to decolonize education that emerges from anticolonial theory, brings to light new dynamics and ways of thinking about and disrupting the hegemony of Dominant Academic English (DAE) in educational spaces. Thus, this presentation will both show the potentials of a hybrid framework, and examine the interconnection of language and literacy to global processes in an order to both further conversations around language rights, as well as the notion of a call for decolonizing education.

References:

Dei, G.J.S. (2006). Introduction: Mapping the terrain - towards a new politics of resistance.

In G.J.S. Dei & A. Kempf (Eds.), Anti-colonialism and education: The politics of resistance. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Dei, G. J. S., & Kempf, A. (2006). Anti-colonialism and education: The politics of resistance. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Ives, P. (2009). Global English, Hegemony and Education: Lessons from Gramsci. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41, 6, 661-683.

Kinloch, V. (2010). "To Not Be a Traitor of Black English": Youth Perceptions of Language
Rights in an Urban Context. Teachers College Record, 112, 1, 103-141.
Rickford, J. (1998).The Creole Origins of African American Vernacular English:Evidence from copula absence. In S. S.

Mufwene, J. Rickford, G. Bailey & J. Baugh (Eds.) African American English. London: Routledge.

Winford, D. ( 1997). On the Origins of African American Vernacular English: A creolist perspective. Part I: The sociohistorical background. Diachronica Hildesheim Then Amsterdam-, 14, 2, 305-344.

Author

• Tanja Burkhard, The Ohio State University - Columbus