I liked what you brought up in your response. You made some important connections between language and identity, and your reflections on Barrett and Shaw were crisp and full of conviction. I particularly enjoyed the way you linked language ideologies to personal experience and institutional power. It provided a grounded, living context to your reply.
That said, I want to sit with one tension. The idea that students need to learn dominant forms for survival is a real one, but it also seems like a trap. Teach standard language merely as a way to get ahead and, without questioning the structures that lay down this very meaning of getting ahead, we end up reinforcing those very structures that marginalize. The standard is never simply a series of grammar rules. It holds history: a history of conquest and exclusion and enforced silence.
Shaw's Incomunicado reminds us that communication is never just about sound or grammar. It is about recognition, about being seen and heard on one's own terms. When that is denied, silence becomes more than absence; it becomes a political stance. Not everyone is silent because they lack language. Some choose to be silent because the institution refuses to listen in the language they speak.
Another striking point you had, about sign variation. That affirms: Diversity in language is not a problem, it's a fact. The real question is: How does power decide which variations to value? By only accepting one form, institutions are not championing clarity, but hierarchy.
What if we stopped teaching students to fit in, and instead taught institutions how to change? What if the classroom refused to fix language and instead began fixing the things language had been used to fix?
That said, I want to sit with one tension. The idea that students need to learn dominant forms for survival is a real one, but it also seems like a trap. Teach standard language merely as a way to get ahead and, without questioning the structures that lay down this very meaning of getting ahead, we end up reinforcing those very structures that marginalize. The standard is never simply a series of grammar rules. It holds history: a history of conquest and exclusion and enforced silence.
Shaw's Incomunicado reminds us that communication is never just about sound or grammar. It is about recognition, about being seen and heard on one's own terms. When that is denied, silence becomes more than absence; it becomes a political stance. Not everyone is silent because they lack language. Some choose to be silent because the institution refuses to listen in the language they speak.
Another striking point you had, about sign variation. That affirms: Diversity in language is not a problem, it's a fact. The real question is: How does power decide which variations to value? By only accepting one form, institutions are not championing clarity, but hierarchy.
What if we stopped teaching students to fit in, and instead taught institutions how to change? What if the classroom refused to fix language and instead began fixing the things language had been used to fix?