Raciolinguistics

Sibo Kanobana & Mi-Cha Flubacher
Open University | Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Table of contents

In recent years, a series of scholars, mainly active in the North American context, have advanced a “raciolinguistic perspective” to analyze how racism is reproduced through language and linguistic ideologies (Alim et al. 2016; Chun and Lo 2016; Flores and Rosa 2015; Rosa 2019). This new perspective studies how raciolinguistic ideologies “conflate certain racialized bodies with linguistic deficiency unrelated to any objective linguistic practices” (Flores and Rosa 2015: 150). Its rapid uptake, especially in North America but also beyond, reflects a broader need to examine how language, racism, and coloniality intersect (for “beyond”, see, e.g., Dixon-Smith 2023; Khan 2020; Pak and Hiramoto 2023; Rühlmann 2023; Williams 2016). However, we wonder whether raciolinguistics is less a new subfield and more a reframing. We argue that it can be seen as both an extension of, and an emphasis on, the critical sociolinguistic analyses put forward by scholars like Ingrid Piller (2011), Bonnie Urciuoli (2012, 2020), Monica Heller and Bonnie McElhinny (2017), and others. As such, it is a timely reminder that sociolinguistics cannot exist without engaging coloniality and the ongoing social production of race (Kanobana and Flubacher 2025).

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