Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race

H. Samy Alim · John R. Rickford · Arnetha F. Ball

Sep 2016 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

Raciolinguistics reveals the central role that language plays in shaping our ideas about race and vice versa. The book brings together a team of leading scholars-working both within and beyond the United States-to share powerful, much-needed research that helps us understand the increasingly vexed relationships between race, ethnicity, and language in our rapidly changing world. Combining the innovative, cutting-edge approaches of race and ethnic studies with fine-grained linguistic analyses, authors cover a wide range of topics including the struggle over the very term "African American," the racialized language education debates within the increasing number of "majority-minority" immigrant communities in the U.S., the dangers of multicultural education in a Europe that is struggling to meet the needs of new migrants, and the sociopolitical and cultural meanings of linguistic styles used in Brazilian favelas, South African townships, Mexican and Puerto Rican barrios in Chicago, and Korean American "cram schools" in New York City, among other sites. Taking into account rapidly changing demographics in the U.S and shifting cultural and media trends across the globe--from Hip Hop cultures, to transnational Mexican popular and street cultures, to Israeli reality TV, to new immigration trends across Africa and Europe--Raciolinguistics shapes the future of scholarship on race, ethnicity, and language. By taking a comparative look across a diverse range of language and literacy contexts, the volume seeks not only to set the research agenda in this burgeoning area of study, but also to help resolve pressing educational and political problems in some of the most contested raciolinguistic contexts in the world.

About the author

H. Samy Alim is Professor of Education and, by courtesy, Anthropology and Linguistics at Stanford University, where he directs the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL), the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA), and African & African American Studies (AAAS). His most recent book, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (2012, with Geneva Smitherman), addresses language and racial politics through an examination of President Barack Obama's language use-and America's response to it. Other books include Street Conscious Rap (1999), You Know My Steez (2004), Roc the Mic Right (2006), Tha Global Cipha (2006), Talkin Black Talk (2007), and Global Linguistic Flows (2009). His forthcoming volume, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies, will appear in 2017 (with Django Paris, Teachers College Press). John R. Rickford is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University and the current President of the Linguistic Society of America. His most recent books include Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (co-authored, 2000, winner of an American Book Award), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (co-edited, 2001), Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-First Century (co-edited, 2004), Language, Culture and Caribbean Identity (co-edited, 2012) and African American, Creole and Other Vernacular Englishes: A Bibliographic Resource (co-authored, 2012). Arnetha F. Ball is a Professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education and former President of the American Educational Research Association. She is author of Multicultural Strategies for Education and Social Change: Carriers of the Torch in the U.S. and South Africa (2006) and co-editor of several volumes including Bahktinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning (2004), African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom (2005), the NSSE volume With More Deliberate Speed (2006) and Studying Diversity in Teacher Education (2011).