28.4358, Review: Sociolinguistics: Alim, Rickford, Ball (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4358. Fri Oct 20 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4358, Review: Sociolinguistics: Alim, Rickford, Ball (2016)

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Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2017 17:58:06
From: Larry LaFond [llafond at siue.edu]
Subject: Raciolinguistics

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-4527.html

EDITOR: H. Samy  Alim
EDITOR: John R. Rickford
EDITOR: Arnetha F. Ball
TITLE: Raciolinguistics
SUBTITLE: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Larry L. LaFond, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

REVIEWS EDITOR: Robert A. Coté 

SUMMARY 
 
Over the last decade, a thoughtful discussion about how race shapes language
and language shapes race has emerged. Certainly, various fields of
linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, dialectology, etc., have
used race as a variable for decades (e.g., Labov 1966 & 1972, Gumperz 1981,
Baugh 2000, and a great many others), but historical events of the last decade
have distinctly foregrounded interactions between race and language. For
example, close scrutiny of Barack Obama’s use of language after his election
in 2008 sparked interest in “racing language and languaging race” (Alim 2009).
 Alim and Smitherson’s reflections on this were encapsulated in their 2012
book: Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language and Race in the U.S.  
 
In this present edited volume, “Raciolinguistics” by H. Samey Alim, John R.
Rickford and Arnetha Ball attempts to broaden and extend this effort by
forging a new field, “raciolinguistics,” which seeks, “…to ask and answer
critical questions about the relations between language, race, and power…”
(2016:3).  This developing area of inquiry attempts to examine close
relationships between race, racism, and language and how these relationships
impact politics, education, identity, and daily life. A basic premise of the
volume is that, while there are some who study language without theorizing
race, and others who study race without fully recognizing the role of language
in racialization, all would be better served by analyzing race and language
together. Their argument is that while race and language may be discrete
concerns, they are not unconnected, and the fields of linguistics and race and
ethnic studies are together important for theorizing new ways forward.

A content-rich introduction (“Introducing Raciolinguistics: Racing Language
and Languaging Race in Hyperracial times”) by H. Samy Alim is followed by 18
chapters looking at race and language in a wide diversity of global contexts
spanning from the U.S.-Mexico border to Israel, from Brazil to Africa, and 
from Spain to the United Kingdom. These chapters are divided into three parts:
Part I – Languaging Race, Part II – Racing Language, and Part III – Language,
Race and Education in Changing Communities. 
 
Part I contains seven chapters, the first two of which demonstrate the
fluidity between phenotype, race and language. In Chapter 1, “Who’s Afraid of
the Transracial Subject?: Raciolinguistics and the Political Project of
Transracializaton,” H. Samy Alim’s treatment of “transracialization” captures
the mutability of language use by reference to an autoethnographic account of
a five-day trip to a conference, a trip during which nine moments arose where
Alim was racialized across five language varieties. Alim presents
transracialization as a dynamic process and suggests that, contrary to
conventional wisdom, one can undergo a “race change.”  

In Chapter 2, “From Upstanding Citizen to North American Rapper and Back
Again: The Racial Malleability of Poor Male Brazilian Youth,” Jennifer Roth
Gordon looks at the role of language in the social construction and racial
malleability of poor, male, Brazilian youth, arguing that both scholars, and
the speakers themselves, must pay attention to fluid raciolinguistic
practices.
 
Chapter 3, “From Mock Spanish to Inverted Spanglish: Language Ideologies and
the Racialization of Mexican and Puerto Rican Youth in the United States,” by
Jonathan Rosa, reveals the complex relationship between context of usage,
language ideology, and linguistic forms as Latinas/os are pushed into
interactional dynamics that force them both to navigate and transform
linguistic boundaries. 

Chapter 4, “The Meaning of Chin- Chong: Language, Racism, and Response in New
Media,” by Elaine W. Chun, analyzed public discourse about racializing terms
along a determinist to potentialist axis and a lexicalist to contextualist
axis, revealing when meaning happens and where meaning lies. Chun’s chapter
points to the necessity to acknowledge diverse folk and scholarly
understandings of racist words.

The challenges faced by Asian Americans are taken up in Chapter 5, “‘Suddenly
faced with a Chinese Village’: The Linguistic Racialization of Asian
Americans,” by Adrienne Lo. Together with the previous chapters by Rosa and
Chun, this set of chapters show how Latinos and Asian Americans are othered,
made foreign, and considered unassimilable in both covert and openly racist
ways, especially through language that reflects white anxiety about the
changing face of America. 
 
Two final two chapters in this section of the book direct attention to
linguistics representations within Hip Hop culture. Chapter 6, “Ethnicity and
Extreme Locality in South Africa's Multilingual Hip Hop Ciphas,” by Quentin E.
Williams, shows how ethnicity and extreme locality combine in the production
of language by providing an ethnographic account involving multilingualism and
race in verbal duels.  

Chapter 7, “Norteño and Sureño Gangs, Hip Hop, and Ethnicity on YouTube:
Localism in California through Spanish Accent Variation,” by Norma
Mendoza-Denton. Mendoza-Denton reveals the use of publicly accessible messages
that are only privately understood by communities associated with the
California-centered specific cultures. 
 
Part II of the book contains five chapters that theorize language through the
lens of race, or “racing language.” These chapters examine how race theory
helps us understand what is going on in performances of language and
sociolinguistic variation. 

The section commences with Chapter 8, “Toward Heterogeneity: A Sociolinguistic
Perspective on the Classification of Black People in the Twenty-First
Century,” by Renée Blake. Blake provides a critique of sociolinguistics, and
argues that language scholars must go beyond traditional social categories of
race and consider the subtle and divergent ways the individuals and groups
“understand themselves with the imposition of national ideology of race”
(2016:154).  
 
In Chapter 9, “Jews of Color: Performing Black Jewishness through the Creative
Use of Two Ethnolinguistic Repertoires,” Sarah Bunin Benor reconsiders the
sociolinguistic notion of “ethnolect,” through an analysis of performances,
presentations and interviews. She argues that there are pools of distinctive
linguistic resources typically associated with African Americans and Jews, and
that, while not all African Americans or Jews use the elements of the
repertoire, individuals make differential use of the features to align
themselves with racial, ethnic, and religious groups.  
 
Chapter 10, “Pharyngeal Beauty and Depharyngealized Geek: Performing Ethnicity
on Israeli Reality TV,” by Roey Gafter looks at Israeli reality television and
uncovers the complex, multilayered social meanings involved in the variant
production of two Hebrew pharyngeal phonemes.  Gafter’s chapter draws on
Eckert’s (2008) model of indexical fields and challenges some aspects of
Labovian (1966) sociolinguistics, in as much as the markers in this study do
not have fixed social meaning. 
 
Chapter 11, “Stance as a Window into the Language-Race Connection: Evidence
from African American and White Speakers in Washington, D.C.,” by  Robert J.
Podesva, goes beyond a description of linguistic features that serve as
components of African American speech to view the use of these features as
resources for differing kinds of identity work. 

Chapter 12, “Changing Ethnicities: The Evolving Speech Styles of Punjabi
Londoners” by Devyani Sharma, completes this section of the book. Sharma’s
chapter reveals enormous complexity in ethnic styles that are only
understandable if gender, history, and class are simultaneously considered,
thus this case study of Punjabi London involves triangulation of varying kinds
of analysis to determine how an individual is situated and the level of their
agency and engagement within a community.
 
Part III of the book contains six chapters looking at language, race, and
education, particularly in cities and communities undergoing transition. The
authors in this section consider the implications of linguistic racialization
for public education, policy and practice and offer solutions, particularly as
they may affect youth of color. 

Chapter 13, ''’It Was a Black City’'': African American Language in
California's Changing Urban Schools and Communities,” by Django Paris,
challenges current pedagogical practices, with Paris promoting a“culturally
sustaining pedagogy,” unlike the monolingual and monocultural policies in most
U.S. schools. 

Chapter 14, “Zapotec, Mixtec, and Purepecha Youth: Multilingualism and the
Marginalization of Indigenous Immigrants in the United States,” by William
Perez, Rafael Vasquez, and Raymond Buriel, provides a unique look at
“trilingual language brokering,” a kind of codeswitching between trilingual
speakers. This chapter, as well as the previous chapter by Paris, consider
which languages are learned, how they are learned, and how youth use language
to navigate their lives in the face of racism and xenophobia.  
 
Chapter 15, “On Being Called Out of One's Name: Indexical Bleaching as a
Technique of Deracialization,” by Mary Bucholtz, further discusses
discriminatory language and practices, highlighting problems related to the
demeaning experience of being renamed against one’s will through conscious
mispronunciation, Anglicization or brazen renaming. Bucholtz regards the
former practice as indexical bleaching, a technique of deracialization.

Chapter 16, “Multiculturalism and Its Discontents: Essentializing Ethnic
Moroccan and Roma Identities in Classroom Discourse in Spain,” by Inmaculada
M. García-Sánchez, gives us a look into the unanticipated consequences of some
educational programs attempting to promote inclusion and participation,
showing how multicultural programs in Spain have at times made Moroccan
immigrants and Roma minority children even more markedly identified as
outsiders.  
 
Chapter 17, “The Voicing of Asian American Figures: Korean Linguistic Styles
at an Asian American Cram School,” by Angela Reyes, provides an interesting
interaction with the Bucholtz chapter, in that it also shows deliberate and
derisive mispronunciation to reproduce racial ideologies. She argues that
language used can only be understood in its linkage to people, which also
involves how images of people are given recognizable qualities, pointing out
the need to examine the voicing of figures.

Finally, in Chapter 18, ''Socials,'' ''Poch at s,'' ''Normals'' y los demás:
School Networks and Linguistic Capital of High School Students on the
Tijuana-San Diego Border,'' Ana Celia Zentella provides a sociolinguistic
ethnography of a border school in California to highlight the use of language
as socially acceptable forms of racism that “stigmatize Mexicans as non-White”
and stigmatize their language as incorrect and deficient. 
 
EVALUATION 
 
Ideas of indexicality, semantic underdetermination, implicature and, more
generally, the recognition that language meanings shift across contexts, are
all concepts that have long been discussed in semantics and pragmatics;
however, the extension of these ideas specifically to look at how racial
identities and racializing practices shift across contexts and time is
relatively new. Alim, Rickford and Ball have assembled an excellent set of
essays that challenge the way we construct social reality. The combined force
of the book is more than academic. It is a call for action in the political
realm and in our personal interactions.

There does not appear to be a specific audience for this book (scholars,
undergraduates, general public, etc.), but rather the book seems to be
intended for anyone who is interested in thinking more deeply about the
interplay of race and language. The chapters are nearly uniformly coherent,
well written, and pleasurable to read; they are scholarly, yet accessible. It
is not hard to imagine this as a text supporting general courses in
sociolinguistics or more specialized courses related to race and language. The
book admirably introduces readers to a new field of inquiry and opens up
vistas for potential future research on the questions it raises. 

There were a few unsatisfying elements to the book. For example, Alim’s
chapter on the transracial subject in some places provided no glosses for
examples intended to make the point of racial translation. This was not an
issue throughout the book (in fact, some chapters such as Roth-Gordons
displayed exceptionally clear glossing). Some of the pictures reproduced in
the book appeared to dark or of grainy quality, which did not enhance the
overall presentation.  

More substantively, while some arguments made in the book are clear enough,
they at times seem a bit overstated. For example, it may be (as Gafter claims)
that early examples of Labovian linguistics tended to view race as a fixed
category, but it would probably be fairer to acknowledge that these studies
focused more on identifying language variation and less on racializing the
speakers of those variations. Furthermore, while the chapters in Part III are
attempts at practical application of raciolinguistic theorizing, those
chapters might have been more persuasive if the specific suggestions made were
supported by cited research. For example, when Zentella advocates the creation
of flagship public high schools where Spanish and English proficiency are
developed equally, the argument could have been strengthened by referencing
the results of schools where this has been done previously. In other words,
pedagogical implications and political proposals are most persuasive when
motivated and informed by research. 

Nonetheless, the overall impression the book makes is quite positive. All the
authors were adept at portraying the linguistic landscape related to race,
challenging assumptions about connections between race and language, and at
providing new intellectual contributions regarding raciolinguistics. They help
us understand the increasing complexities of a changing world, and to envision
how to make that world a more hospitable place for all. 
 
REFERENCES 
 
Alim, H. Samy. Racing Language, Languaging Race. Paper presented at the
University of California, Los Angeles Symposium on Race and Ethnicity in
Language, Interaction and Culture. February 27. 
 
Alim, H. Samy & Geneva Smitherson. 2012. Articulate While Black: Barack Obama,
Language, and
Race in the U.S. New York: Oxford University Press. 
 
Baugh, John. 2000. Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Eckert, Penelope. 1990. The Whole Woman: Sex and Gender Differences in
Variation. Language
Variation and Change 1. 245-67. 

Gumperz, John J. 1981. Ethnic Differences in Communicative Style. In: C. A.
Ferguson and S. Brice
Heath (eds.) Language in the USA. Cambridge University Press. 
 
Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City.
Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. 
 
Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English
Vernacular. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Larry LaFond is Professor of English Language and Literature at Southern
Illinois University Edwardsville, where he teaches pre- and in-service ESL
teachers and undergraduate students in linguistics. His current research
interests are in second language acquisition, syntax, and dialectal variation
within American Midlands English.





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