When I try to name "linguistic justice" after these readings, I keep landing on it as a set of commitments over a single definition. Phuong and Venegas, drawing on Tuck and Yang, talk about "justice projects" instead of a fixed framework, where worldview, strategy, motive and everyday practices are intertwined. For me, linguistic justice becomes the work of disrupting ableist, racist and monolingual arrangements that decide whose language practices are recognized as real, intelligent and teachable, and whose are pathologized or erased. Baker-Bell fine-tunes that idea for me. Her students' comments like "I always thought it was bad" after learning Black Language's history show how schooling trains Black youth to "scoff" at their own linguistic inheritance. Linguistic justice here is not only "including" Black English; it's explicitly naming Anti-Black Linguistic Racism, teaching the history and grammar of Black Language and positioning Black students as experts of their own linguistic system. That feels very different from the vague "respect all dialects" language I often see in encouraged in teacher standards. Valente's description of classe LSF pushes me to think about disability and language together. In that playground scene, inclusion is shown as a hybrid linguistic space where deaf and non-deaf children and adults share responsibility for communication, with sign language treated as central, not supplemental. That challenges the forms of "inclusion" I’ve seen in U.S. schools where disabled and emergent bilingual students are physically present but linguistically isolated. Garcia et al.'s framing of "emergent bilinguals" adds another layer. They insist on students’ full repertoires and argue that translanguaging and pluriliteracies should organize curriculum, assessment and technology use, not just appear as side strategies. When they point out that most emergent bilinguals are in under-resourced, English-only settings, I hear an indictment of how far our current systems are from linguistic justice.
Putting these together, I now see practicing linguistic justice in education as at least four things:
(1) Centering leadership of those most impacted, as disability justice frameworks demand.
(2) Presuming competence and designing multimodal, translanguaging spaces where students can actually use their full repertoires.
(3) Explicitly teaching the histories and structures of stigmatized languages and varieties.
(4) Refusing race-evasive and disability-evasive policies that treat language as neutral.
Then, I'm left wondering how teachers can guard against turning "linguistic justice" into empty promises, rather than a set of concrete, accountable choices about grouping, assessment and who gets to decide what counts as language in the first place.