Academic language is a raciolinguistic ideology that frames affluent white language practices as inherently academic and low-income racialized language practices as inherently non-academic.
But there's more. The whole idea of academic language is a colonial discourse
But there's more. The whole idea of academic language is a colonial discourse
While educational linguists have typically focused their attention on the prescriptivist imposition of standardized national languages, another aspect of the rise of nation-state/colonial governmentality relates to the rise of the language of the human sciences.
This language of the human sciences was used to justify the marginalization of the lower classes and racialized people through supposedly objective descriptions of these communities that positioned them as lower on the evolutionary scale than the emerging Europeans bourgeoisie.
Bauman and Briggs specifically examined the emergence of a science of language that framed the linguistic knowledge of lower class and racialized people as unimportant. Language, from this view, could only be understood one step removed from the actual lived experience of people.
Describing reality in this way entailed developing new discursive practices that sought to describe the world from a distance and in seemingly objective terms. In reality, there was nothing objective about these discursive practices.
This seemingly objective discourse served to perpetuate colonial relations of power that framed racialized communities as lacking the ability to describe their own experiences all under the guise of disinterested knowledge production.
So when ed linguists say that POC have to master academic language they overlook that the white listening subject will never hear them as sufficiently academic while asking them to use a discourse that frames their communities as lower on the evolutionary scale then white people.
