This week’s reading interrogates the fluid definition of bilingualism, especially the ways it is weaponized and how institutions, researchers, and sometimes well-meaning educators reinforce colonial logics through “neutral” trajectories of thought about language. The texts issue a call to rethink language as lived, political, and contested; in other words, as something opposed to being an inert cognitive feature or a neatly separated classroom variable. Bilingualism is not a “thing” in individual brains, but rather a relational, ideological, and racialized act that is immensely shaped by power.
In this episode of The Vocal Fries Pod “Bilingual Is. It Just Is”, Flores and Rosa engage in a critical examination of research ideology in linguistics and ideologies within public discourse. Flores finds that “We can trace the discourses of semilingualism back to the origins of European colonialism... one of the primary mechanisms for dehumanizing Indigenous populations, African populations, by calling into question their language practices.” Here, Flores positions the concept of “semilingualism”, the language that racialized groups are somehow deficient in both their native and dominant languages, as not merely erroneous but in fact a tool of empire. This overturns the notion that linguistic categories are apolitical and rather, that these categories serve to deny legitimacy. Jonathan Rosa goes further into this critique in articulating the notion of “ideologies of languagelessness” which “frame certain populations as deficient in any language that they use” (The Vocal Fries Pod). This is what pathologizes bilingual speakers, but that pathologization is done selectively across race and class lines. Rosa incisively comments on what is seen as a skill in Mayor Pete becoming a deficit in someone’s immigrant father as “Spanish in Pete’s brain is beautiful and amazing, but in my father it’s somehow a deficit and they beat it out of him when he started school” (The Vocal Fries Pod). These sorts of selective valuations of bilingualism are again present in Nelson Flores’s critique of cognitive exceptionalism as he states “Why are we exceptionalizing the, quote, 'bilingual brain' instead of the quote, 'monolingual brain'... bilingualism is, it just is” (The Vocal Fries Pod). The radical gesture here is refusing to valorize bilingualism as a superpower, while at the same time refusing to criminalize it. Flores urges instead a reframing of the language question, where language is ordinary or collective and something shaped by context. Or, as Rosa puts it “bilingualism lives between people, not within people” (The Vocal Fries Pod).
This relational perspective is the core of the video “Translanguaging in 15 Minutes,” which differentiates translanguaging from code-switching as it states that “Translanguaging is an insider’s perspective... learners work from a unified collection of linguistic features not naturally separated into systems.” This contradicts hegemonic educational and assessment structures that are dependent on discrete, named languages, which is a legacy of colonial nation-state logics. The video explains that these “named languages” are not neutral as “We are talking about colonizing institutions who had an interest in studying the people they were colonizing, usually to subjugate and govern them.” In other words, insisting on named languages is a continuation of the empire, not just a pedagogical or academic preference.
This critique materializes in “Bilingualism as conceptualized and bilingualism as lived”, as a bilingual Chinese-American family navigating autism diagnoses and monolingual educational policies is explored. Although trying to follow the professional advice to only speak English, ethnographic analysis shows that the family’s language practices are more hybrid as “When family members spoke with Oscar, they infused 'Chineseness' into their English utterances in ways that made it difficult to say when one language ended and another began” (p. 429). Here, the divide between English and Chinese is a bureaucratic creation that doesn’t describe how families relate and communicate. The study critiques this gap between what parents are told they “should” do like only speak English and what actually helps their child to engage since “Contextual relevance and moment-by-moment supports for interactional alignment were more important to his successful participation than what language was being used” (p. 432). That insight shows how language policy in special education policies not only language but identity, parenting, and care. It pathologizes families for their linguistic practices, even when those practices actually work. What the mother in the study has to say of the professional advice she was given serves as a confirmation as she states that “I just always felt very hurt... I just do my best because that’s what the teacher told us” (p. 428). This is no act of neutrally observing an interaction as institutional power becomes the arbitrator for what love, care, and success look like as filtered through a white monolingual lens.
What these three sources have in common is their dedication to uprooting the fiction of the monolingual ideal, a fiction that promotes whitism, academic gatekeeping, and deficit based logics. From school speech therapists to social scientists to media pundits, enforcing named languages and “proper” linguistic behaviors is a way of deciding who is allowed to be fully human. Language is a deeply intimate realm of identity and belonging that is also a profoundly political terrain historically marked by colonialism, racism, and institutional control.