Whiteness as the standard: Shifting ideologies, race, and social context

Authors

• Kelsey Swift, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

In previous work, I have documented and analyzed the persistence of mainstream ideologies around ’standard’ and ’nonstandard’ American English in the adult ESOL classroom and their connection to linguistic racism and anti-Blackness. This study explores how these ideologies developed more broadly, employing elements of raciolinguistic genealogy and metapragmatics to analyze historical language scholarship. I find that while the linguistic features of ‘nonstandard’ English have remained remarkably consistent in the popular imagination, they became increasingly linked with Blackness, especially during and after white backlash to the Great Migration (and other cultural and political changes) in the mid-20th century. I argue that this represents a larger pattern in the relationship between language and race in the United States, and conclude with a discussion of the implications this has for adult immigrants and the ESOL classroom.

Comments

This is the author's accepted manuscript of an article originally published in Linguistics and Education, available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2024.101319

This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).