Linguistic racism

In the terminology of linguistic anthropology, linguistic racism, both spoken and written, is a mechanism that perpetuates discrimination, marginalization, and prejudice customarily based on an individual or community's linguistic background. The most evident manifestation of this kind of racism is racial slurs; however there are covert forms of it.^[1] Linguistic racism also relates to the concept of "racializing discourses," which is defined as the ways race is discussed without being explicit but still manages to represent and reproduce race.^[2] This form of racism acts to classify people, places, and cultures into social categories while simultaneously maintaining this social inequality under a veneer of indirectness and deniability.^[2]

Different forms of linguistic racism include covert and overt linguistic racism, linguistic appropriation, linguistic profiling, linguistic erasure, standard language ideology, pejorative naming, and accent discrimination. Relevantly, linguistic purism is a foundational factor in many forms of linguistic racism, as it is a practice of defining a language as purer or of higher quality relationally to other languages. Therefore, linguistic purism is also motivated by protecting the perceived purity of specific languages from "corruption" or degradation, further defining and classifying languages and cultures hierarchically based on a perceived difference of quality or historical authenticity.^[3] Because language and race have been deeply intertwined historically, race remains a crucial concept in understanding how languages are defined and how the study of language developed.^{[4]: 382}

Languages coincide with classifying and reinforcing racial groups and the social associations with those groups, which relates to racialization. Racialization is the process of imposing and prescribing a racial category to a person or group, often by associating certain racialized traits such as cultural history, skin color, and physical features.^{[4]: 382} Language constitutes authoritative knowledge as well. When speaking a specific language, one adopts its ideas of morality and discipline, including the dynamics of power that gives particular groups authority and others not.^{[5]: 117} Additionally, how languages are taught and standardized contributes to how authoritative knowledge is created.^{[5]: 117}

Andrea Moro in his essay, "La Razza e la lingua" ("Race and Language"), shows that there are two ideas that look innocuous if considered as separated but which are extremely dangerous if combined: first, that there are languages that are better than others; second, that reality is perceived and elaborated differently, according to the language one speaks. He highlights that this linguistic racism was at the origin of the myth of the Aryan race and the devastating results it had on civilization.^[6]

Scholars known for their work on linguistic racism and related concepts such as linguicism and linguistic imperialism include Jane H. Hill, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Suresh Canagarajah, Geneva Smitherman, and Teun A. van Dijk. Linguistic racism is studied in multiple disciplines, which include communication studies, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, education, and psychology.