Over the past few years, I have carried out extensive fieldwork in secondary schools in England, where my focus has been the beliefs about spoken language on display in classrooms, corridors and staffrooms. These schools were all in areas of economic deprivation with a large intake of racially marginalised children.

One of the things that struck me during this work was the children’s linguistic dexterity and creativity. They transcended different languages, drew on multiple varieties of English, displayed complex syntax, rhetorical flair and technical vocabulary. Yet when I spoke to teachers about these children, they were often described quite differently. Some teachers suggested they were ‘limited’ or ‘lazy’ in their language, and needed to learn ‘academic language’ to guarantee success in school. Some suggested they needed to speak ‘properly’ using ‘standard English’, and some suggested they needed to be more ‘articulate’. It was clear to me that these children were perfectly capable of doing these things, but still they were perceived as linguistically deficient.

I want to be clear that I am not criticising teachers. I am critiquing the ideologies about language which are pervasive in schools in England. Language ideologies are durable, long-standing beliefs about language. All of us are socialised into these ideologies from a young age – the idea that there is an ‘appropriate’ way to speak; that there is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ vocabulary; that some speakers are more ‘fluent’ than others; that certain varieties of a language are more ‘correct’ than others, and so on. These ideologies are not things that exist purely in individual minds but are anchored to a colonial logic in which certain ways of being in the world are deemed to be more acceptable than others.

‘Language ideologies are not things that exist purely in individual minds but are anchored to a colonial logic in which certain ways of being in the world are deemed to be more acceptable than others.’

Language ideologies are persistent

Language ideologies are rarely, if ever, just about language. And England’s schools have long been spaces where language ideologies are a central force in the production of structural injustices. For example, in the 1960s and ’70s, language ideologies coalesced with anti-Blackness in the design of so-called ‘Schools for the Educationally Subnormal’ (see Coard, 1971). In these schools, Black children were framed as intellectually inferior based on perceptions that their language was sub-standard. These ideologies persist today (Wallace & Joseph-Salisbury, 2021). They are also a systemic and institutionalised feature of Ofsted (Cushing & Snell, 2023). In this work, we exposed how Ofsted perceive the language of Black, working-class children as symptomatic of an unwillingness to engage in school, as a sign of misbehaviour, and a barrier to educational progress. I have also shown how racially marginalised pre-service teachers get framed as unable to teach properly, based on objectively unrelated (but ideologically connected) assessments of their accent (Cushing, 2023).

Language ideologies change their shape over time. They enable deficit thinking: a victim-blaming narrative which pins the responsibility on marginalised communities to change themselves (Valencia, 1997). From notions of ‘restricted codes’, ‘verbal deprivation’, ‘semilingualism’ and ‘word gaps’, deficit thinking about language is rife. But while the labels change, the underlying logics remain the same: that marginalised communities lack adequate language, and therefore require linguistic remediation. I have seen this most recently with the renewed emphasis on ‘oracy’ (Cushing, 2024). These ideologies persist despite decades of ethnographic work which has highlighted the linguistic strengths that marginalised children are already in possession of when they come to school (see for example Heath, 1983; Rosa, 2019). This work has shown that the problem lies not with speakers, but with how they are perceived.

Dismantling language ideologies

How then, do we dismantle language ideologies? Educating teachers in sociolinguistics is a start. But that is not an adequate solution. Building futures of social justice in linguistics is not about modifying individual minds to become more accepting of non-dominant language patterns. Social justice in language education is about the radical transformation of structures to uproot dominant language ideologies. Confronting and dismantling language ideologies requires not only new theories of language which resist deficit labels but also a theory of change which connects efforts for linguistic justice with broader struggles for social justice.

This transformative theory of change highlights the linguistic strengths that marginalised children possess, but it also points to the socioeconomic roots which shape their marginalisation – access to education, food, housing, healthcare, labour, heating, and so on. This perspective demands new futures of structural justice (Sriprakash, 2023). It shows how linguistic oppression and liberation are just one part of broader social struggles. It requires radical social transformation, rejecting theories of change which rely on marginalised communities to transform themselves.

References

Coard, B. (1971). How the West Indian child is made educationally sub-normal in the British school system. New Beacon Books.

Cushing, I. (2023). ‘Miss, can you speak English?’: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language oppression in initial teacher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 44(5), 896–911. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2023.2206006

Cushing, I. (2024). Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy. Oxford Review of Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2024.2311134

Cushing, I., & Snell, J. (2023). The (white) ears of Ofsted: A raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate. Language in Society, 52 (3), 363–386. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000094

Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge University Press.

Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad. Oxford University Press.

Sriprakash, A. (2023). Reparations: Theorising just futures of education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44(5), 782–795. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2022.2144141

Valencia, R. (1997). The evolution of deficit thinking: Educational thought and practice. Routledge.

Wallace, D., & Joseph-Salisbury, R. (2021). How, still, is the Black Caribbean child made educationally subnormal in the English school system? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 45(8), 1426–1452. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2021.1981969