Black Englishes and the Global Multilingual Imperative

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Interrogating Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives on Racial Equity for Multilinguals (Table 21)

Abstract

Perspectives
The long-standing use of the term ‘Black English’, originally synonymous with African American English, represents an increasingly complexified notion of Blackness as language and languaging—a global construction. Black Englishes, though often assigned to the periphery of ‘World Englishes’ (Kachru, 1992), institutions, schools, and the academy at large, have maintained a beauty and utility that transcend institutional exclusion and now function as a key mechanism for communicative repertoires across both offline and virtual spaces. The increasing proliferation of African American Englishes, Black South African Englishes, Black Caribbean Englishes, West African Pidgin Englishes demonstrates variation in how ‘Black English’ has transitioned from being a language (often marked inferiorly as a ‘dialect’: see Authors, 2021) representative of the ‘Black American’ to reflecting a multiplicity, hybridity, and fluidity necessarily inherent in the notion of diasporic Blackness and Englishes within and beyond North American borders.
This transition is at once steeped largely in emerging constructions regarding the racialization of language based on raciolinguistic ideology (Alim et al., 2016; Alim, 2016; Rosa & Flores, 2017) as a function of institutions and society as well as coupled with a persisting complexification of Blackness at the individual level. In turn, both representations reconstruct Black Englishes as a language of all Blacks on the one hand and as a language of no single Black person or population on the other. The evolving transition and representations of Black racialized languaging are also influenced to some degree by emerging notions of translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014) as a function of multilingualism which seek to locate each speaker and user of language as having a distinct individual linguistic repertoire, and by translingual Englishes (Dovchin, 2019; Pennycook, 2006), through which ideologies of authenticity and race undergird their instantiation across boundaries.

Objectives
Through an evolution which challenges the rendering of Black speakers as lacking multilingualism and thus as Englishless, emerges a distinctive connotation of Black Englishes that includes but also extends beyond African American English, a dynamic made visible through nuanced lenses such as that of Black Caribbean and Black African Englishes in the United States. This presentation argues that this dynamic reflects how Englishes and language emerge in the lived experience of multilingualism as a function of becoming Black (Ibrahim, 1999), becoming immigrants, and becoming speakers of racialized Englishes and languaging – signals reconstructions undergirding Black Englishes often framed by a Black-White binary and by nationalization even while extending beyond it.

Warrants for Arguments
As the focus of World Englishes has shifted from an emphasis on users and the linguistic features and structures that identify and differentiate them to a concentration on uses of Englishes as a reflection of communicative repertoires that signal identity, Black Englishes have come to function as a key multilingual mechanism that illustrates how linguistic resources leveraged by Black people are taken up often and largely by all peoples, to contextually construct, represent, and remix meaning. In doing so, this global meaning-making multilingual heuristic expands a notion of Black Englishes for all.

Author

• Patriann Smith, University of South Florida