Thread by @GJosephRoche

Linguistic justice 🪡

What would a good theory of linguistic justice do? At a minimum, it would help explain global patterns of language oppression - how is injustice driving the elimination of half the worlds languages? 1/n

Sorry, adequate, not good. At present we don’t have a theory of linguistic justice that helps explain global patterns of language oppression, so we don’t have an adequate theory of linguistic justice. 2/n

How would we know this theory works? At least two ways.

1. It would provide new solutions for addressing language oppression, and...

3/n

2. It would make the issue of language oppression and other forms of linguistic injustice legible to broader conversations about social justice. More people would ‘get’ language issues and how they intersect with other contours of oppression.

4/n

Why don’t we have an adequate or good theory of linguistic justice? Well, at least two reasons.

1. Linguists who study named languages don’t study social justice but often have an implicitly liberal understanding of justice.

5/n

2. People who study social justice tend to be skeptical of, if not hostile towards, the idea that named languages are real, or matter.

6/n

Well I might leave this here for now and go back to cleaning the kitchen.

Ok, dishes are done (man). Back to linguistics justice...

There is a discussion about linguistic justice in linguistics, including sociolinguistics, but it is neither adequate nor good (as above) for at least two reasons. 7/n

1. ‘Justice’ tends to get imported into linguistics using the formula 1+2=12. What I mean is, the two domains tend to remain parallel rather than being synthesised. 8/n

Evidence of this is the lack of engagement with the foundational literature on justice and engagement with key debates in that literature. 9/n

Linguists tend not to specify what they mean when they say justice (Rawls? Fraser? Young? Fanon?), and when they do, their concept often doesn’t bring with it the sense of a living contested concept positioned with an evolving conversation. 10/n

Side note: The same thing happened with the idea of linguistic resilience - there was no historical or geneological work done to interrogate the concept and if it was really appropriate to helping communities maintain or revitalise their language. 11/n

But an important clue as to why resilience is a bad idea is the fact that it took off, in part, in post 9/11 US psychology as a way to explore how people in a country without a functioning public healthcare system should respond to trauma 🤷‍♂️

Anyway, the lack of critical engagement with justice debates is part of the reason why broader social justice communities don’t pick up what linguists have to say about linguistic justice. (Is it like anthropologists looking at economists talking about culture? 😬) 13/n

What’s the evidence that our theories of linguistic justice are not good? Pick up any introductory reader or handbook on social justice and you won’t find a chapter on linguistic justice. 14/n

Look at any intersectional roll call (X intersects with 1, 2, and 3 to produce unique forms of injustice), and you won’t find language. 15/n

So our theories of linguistic justice aren’t really good because we don’t take justice seriously. Why aren’t our theories of linguistic justice adequate, in the sense of addressing global patterns of language oppression? 16/n

Well, I think that definitely a huge part of this is the continuing dominance of the Global North in scholarship. We don’t see global patterns because we don’t look at the world. 17/n

North American linguistics is particularly parochial. This came out nicely in the recent articles published in Language about linguistics, racial justice, and inclusion. 18/n

Thread continues:

https://mobile.twitter.com/GJosephRoche/status/1378123168116658178

Anyway, more chores to do, might come back to this?