Language and Race: Settler Colonial Consequences and Epistemic Disruptions

Abstract

This article reviews anthropological paradigms that link language and race with a focus on the United States and other settler colonial nations that continue to use language as a tool of racialization to bolster White supremacy. Enduring colonial ideologies, along with Boas's “salvage anthropology,” which separated race and language, have enshrined White racism in anthropological studies of language as well as in the field of linguistic anthropology. Contemporary studies frame linguistic racialization through markedness theory and use paradigms of language ideology, language materiality, and semiotics to forward discursive and ontological analyses that span communities and institutional spaces. I offer “disruption” as a way to consider the impact of epistemologies that inform academic research agendas as well as institutional power dynamics between BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) scholars and White practitioners in linguistic anthropology and discuss how these disruptions could form the basis from which to decolonize aspects of linguistic anthropology.