Heritage language, racialization, and (post-)colonialism

Abstract

This introduction to a double special issue features anti-hegemonic conceptualizations of imagined relationships between heritage and heritage language; race, racism, and racialization; colonialism and coloniality. It considers each set of terms as predominantly shaped by European colonialisms and semiotically configured into metrics of sociolinguistic inequality promulgating and/or resisting white supremacy in its various forms and permutations around the globe. Each of the articles foregrounds a semiotic framework for examining linguistic phenomena growing out of colonial projects of race science, racialization, and raciolinguistics, historically and today, and therefore explores how racially minoritized communities speak, write, teach, learn, preserve, and hide or misrecognize minority languages conceptualized as “heritage language” and “linguistic heritage.” The introduction also provides an overview of anthropological and other related research on heritage, colonialism, and race to highlight how ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and historical methods can disentangle ready-made conflations between the three while analyzing dynamic interactions.