Start Date: 7/1/2025 2:00 PM EDT
End Date: 7/1/2025 3:30 PM EDT
Venue Name: Online Webinar
Organization Name:
LSA
Contact:
LSA Presidential Research Forum -
Reframing Our Language Experience: Challenging Essentialist Labels in Linguistics
Speakers: Ethan Kutlu, Kelly Kendro, Felicia Bisnath, Savithry Namboodiripad, Lina Hou, Anne Therese Frederiksen, Eve Higby, Reinaldo Cabrera Perez
Essentialist labels like native speaker or mono/bilingual lack empirical validity and reinforce social inequities. Rooted in ideology rather than linguistic reality, this construct distorts scientific inquiry, educational assessments, and professional evaluations. By imposing artificial homogeneity, it devalues linguistic diversity and perpetuates systemic biases in academia, language assessment, and clinical practice. These categories reify social divisions, exclude marginalized groups, and hinder scientific progress. We advocate for a shift away from essentialist proxies toward empirically driven, contextually grounded characterizations of language use. A reflexive, interdisciplinary approach is crucial to dismantling these harmful frameworks and fostering more accurate, inclusive, and equitable research. This shift is not only necessary for language science but also for adjacent fields. Ultimately, rejecting essentialist assumptions will deepen our understanding of language, identity, and social belonging, driving both scientific and societal transformation.
Rethinking the "Native" Speaker: Essentialism and Linguistic Theory
Speakers: Ethan Kutlu & Kelly Kendro
Linguistics, as it developed in 19th-century Europe and America, co-evolved with essentialist views on language and identity. A key yet undertheorized concept is the "native" speaker/signer, often tied to monolingualism. Here, we examine how this term fails to capture broad language experiences and its limitations in shaping linguistic theory.
Characterizing sign language users and communities: Rethinking "nativeness" via qualitatively-informed quantitative approaches
Speaker: Felicia Bisnath, Savithry Namboodiripad, Lina Hou
Building from research in small-scale communities, we apply exploratory cluster analysis to characterize the language exposure and use of 269 ASL signers. Signers who linguists would classify as "native" do not pattern together and do not meaningfully differ from "non-native" signers. Rejecting "nativeness" better characterizes signing practices across communities.
Implications of Essentialist Characterizations of Language Beyond Linguistics
Speaker: Anne Therese Frederiksen. Eve Higby, Reinaldo Cabrera Perez
Linguistics is rooted in colonialism and ableism (e.g., Charity-Hudley et al.). Insights from linguistics shape applied fields like education and speech-language pathology. In this talk, we discuss the broader impact of essentialist language characterizations on educators and clinicians and their consequences in practice.
