Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective
Abstract
This article presents what we term a raciolinguistic perspective , which theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying race and language, we seek to understand how and why these categories have been co-naturalized, and to imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy. We explore five key components of a raciolinguistic perspective: (i) historical and contemporary colonial co-naturalizations of race and language; (ii) perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (iii) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (iv) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (v) contestations of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect our investment in developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic inequality on the one hand, and our commitment to the imagination and creation of more just societies on the other. (Race, language ideologies, colonialism, governmentality, enregisterment, structural inequality)*
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Critiques of español ratatá are products of the 'white listening subject,' through which racialized speakers are always heard as deficient regardless of their actual linguistic practices.
“Following Rosa and Flores's (2017) raciolinguistic perspective, we interpret the critiques of español ratatá as products of the “white listening subject” (p.627), through which racialized speakers are always heard as deficient regardless of their actual linguistic practices.”
From Sounds Like Politics: Cardi B and the Discourse of Español Ratatá (2026) · cites this paper as Rosa and Flores's (2017)
Cardi B's popularity and visibility underscore the need to conceptualize español ratatá as including some U.S. Latinx heritage speakers whose linguistic practices may diverge from standardized norms, shaped by usage patterns and sociocultural contexts, thereby challenging standard language ideologies.
“Cardi B's popularity, and thus the visibility of her linguistic practices, underscores the need to conceptualize español ratatá in ways that include some U.S. Latinx heritage speakers whose linguistic practices may diverge from standardized norms, not as a deliberate rejection of formality, but as shaped by usage patterns and sociocultural contexts, thereby challenging standard language ideologies”
From Sounds Like Politics: Cardi B and the Discourse of Español Ratatá (2026) · cites this paper as Rosa & Flores, 2017
Raciolinguistic ideologies help us understand how linguistic practices become racialized markers that grant or deny the possibility of ethnoracial identification.
“Here, raciolinguistic ideologies (Rosa & Flores, 2017) help us understand how linguistic practices become racialized markers that grant or deny the possibility of ethnoracial identification.”
From Sounds Like Politics: Cardi B and the Discourse of Español Ratatá (2026) · cites this paper as Rosa & Flores, 2017
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Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education.
Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015) · Harvard Educational Review · doi:10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149 · Cited by 2,829 · see citing works
Self-citationBONILLA, Y., & ROSA, J. (2015) · American Ethnologist · doi:10.1111/amet.12112 · Cited by 1,116 · cited 1× · see citing works
“…killedMichael Brown, an unarmedAfricanAmerican teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri, Wilson suggested that Brown’s stature was monstrous and threatening despite the fact that he and Brown were the same height and he was the only one armed with a deadly weapon in their altercation (Bonilla & Rosa 2015).”
BackgroundSelf-citationLanguage, Race, and White Public Space
Hill, J. H. (1998) · American Anthropologist · doi:10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.680 · Cited by 972 · cited 2× · see citing works
“…Press, 2017 0047-4045/16 $15.00 621 Language in Society 46, 621–647. doi:10.1017/S0047404517000562 challenging racializing discourses (Urciuoli 1996; Hill 1998; Dick & Wirtz 2011), they remain as pervasive as ever, as illustrated by recent claims about the supposed thirty million ‘word gap’…”
BackgroundInfluentialThe Everyday Language of White Racism
Hill, J. H. (2008) · doi:10.1002/9781444304732 · Cited by 909 · see citing works
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Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of “Bias” in NLP
Blodgett, S. L., Barocas, S., Daumé III, H., & Wallach, H. (2020) · Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.485 · Cited by 1,050 · see citing works
“This perspective belongs to a broader set of raciolinguistic ideologies (Rosa and Flores, 2017), which also produce allocational harms; speakers of AAE are frequently penalized for not adhering to dominant language practices, including in the education system (Alim, 2004; Terry et al., 2010), when…”
BackgroundInfluentialAI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect
Hofmann, V., Kalluri, P. R., Jurafsky, D., & King, S. (2024) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07856-5 · Cited by 233 · see citing works
Marked and Unmarked Translanguaging in Accelerated, Mainstream, and Sheltered English Classrooms
Beiler, I. R. (2021) · Multilingua · doi:10.1515/multi-2020-0022 · Cited by 75 · see citing works
Zheng, K. (2025) · Linguistics and Education · doi:10.1016/j.linged.2025.101406 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
Sounds Like Politics: Cardi B and the Discourse of Español Ratatá
Delgado, R., Mora-Moreno, S., & Cervantes-Gómez, X. V. (2026) · Latino Studies · doi:10.1057/s41276-026-00579-w
- Authors
- Rosa, J., & Flores, N.
- Affiliations
- Stanford University (US)
- University of Pennsylvania (US)
- Corresponding author
- Rosa, Jonathan
- Flores, Nelson
- Venue
- Language in Society
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2017-09-11
- Volume
- 46
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 621-647
- ISSN
- 0047-4045 (ISSN-L)
- 1469-8013
- OpenAlex
- W2754426660
- Cited by
- 1,675
- References
- 8
- Citations by year
- 2026: 245 · 2025: 293 · 2024: 283 · 2023: 231 · 2022: 213 · 2021: 164 · 2020: 142 · 2019: 80 · 2018: 21 · 2017: 1 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 213.54
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Language in Society (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Multilingual Education and Policy
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Critical Race Theory in Education
- Keywords
- language and race, colonialism, language ideology, governmentality, enregisterment, racial inequality, language inequality, white supremacy, intersectionality, denaturalization, structural inequality, power formation
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