Abstract
This chapter demonstrates that metalinguistic communities can draw on language ideologies about non-group members to construct their own social identity. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of parents and legal professionals in a California child welfare court, López-Espino argues that social workers, judges, and attorneys routinely use the category of “Spanish speakers” in ways that implicitly emphasize their own English-dominant language practices as standard and normative. Building on existing scholarship on raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores and Rosa 2015), López-Espino argues that legal professionals conflate being Spanish-dominant as indicative of lacking “sophistication,” lacking legal status, being passive, and having deficient cultural practices of child-rearing. The chapter concludes that the circulation of such raciolinguistic ideologies can negatively affect racialized and minoritized persons’ access to a fair and equitable legal experience.
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López-Espino, J. (2021). Raciolinguistic Ideologies of Spanish Speakers in a California Child Welfare Court. In: Avineri, N., Harasta, J. (eds) Metalinguistic Communities. Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76900-0_10
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