You're kindly invited to our next virtual Plurilingual Lab Speaker Series event with Dr. Stephen May of Te Puna Wānanga (School of Māori and Indigenous Education), University of Auckland, New Zealand:
Linguistic racism(s): Origins, developments, and implications
Racialized discourses of language (use) – what I will term here, linguistic racism(s) – are situated within sociohistorical and sociopolitical contexts, grounded in nationalism and colonialism, that privilege dominant national and international languages, public monolingualism, and native-speaker competence in those languages. In contrast, related linguistic hierarchies of prestige pathologize non-dominant language – often Indigenous and/or bi/multilingual – speakers and construct their language use(s) in both overtly and covertly racialized terms. The result is regular linguistic racism, discrimination, and subordination experienced by non-dominant language speakers, inevitably framed within wider racialized institutional and everyday discursive practices.
In this presentation, I will first chart the interdisciplinary understandings of linguistic racism, drawing on sociological discussions of nationalism and critical race theory, and sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological discussions of language ideologies, linguistic racism, and raciolinguistics. I will then discuss, by way of example, its prevalence in my own national context, Aotearoa New Zealand, with particular reference to contemporary discursive racist constructions of our Indigenous language, te reo Māori (the Māori language). I will conclude with suggestions of how we might more broadly address/contest these kinds of (linguistically) racialized discourses.
Dr. Stephen May is Professor in Te Puna Wānanga (School of Māori and Indigenous Education) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is an international authority on language rights, language policy, bilingual education, the multilingual turn in language teaching, and critical multicultural approaches to education. Stephen has published over 100 articles and book chapters in these areas, along with 27 books, including the award-winning Language and minority rights (2nd ed., 2012) and The multilingual turn (2014). His most recent book is Critical ethnography, language, race/ism and education (2023). Stephen is Editor-in-Chief of the 10-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Education (3rd ed., 2017), and founding co-editor of the journal Ethnicities. He is an AERA Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ). URL:
When: June 6, 2024 (Thursday)
Time: 5pm-6:30pm (EST, Montreal)
Mode of delivery: synchronous via Zoom
Registration required. Please click .
This is a public event and all are welcome. This Speaker Series is sponsored by Concordia University's , and co-organized by the Research Group and McGill's Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE).
A recording will be made available on the .
