Scholar-Activism in Linguistics

Although both the Rickford and Lupyan were both critically important and interesting insights in the field of linguistics, the Rickford reading connected to discussions that I’ve had with various friends and through my PWR 2 class on action research and scholar-activism. Scholar-activism is essentially a mechanism through which an academic begins with a hypothesis and through experimentation develops a conclusion that they then advocate for implementing. The Rickford reading in many ways suggested this be an approach that should be more commonplace in the field of linguistics, while specifically noting the partnership between linguists and the African American community.

The premise of the argument is that linguists have been studying African American Vernacular English (AAVE) without allying themselves with African Americans to advocate for equity and justice in systems that historically oppress African Americans. A quote that emphasizes this notion is that Labov argues that “An investigator who has obtained linguistic data from members of a speech community has an obligation to use the knowledge based on that data for the benefit of the community,” and this is not readily seen in academic spaces. Therefore, Rickford is proposing this idea of scholar-activism by presenting two different kinds of activities they, as linguists, may get involved with. The first are activities that draw on their expertise in linguistics such as training and employing more African American linguists and doing research on better ways of teaching reading and the language arts at the elementary, secondary, and adult education levels. The second are activities that bear little relation to linguistics such as working in soup kitchens and applying for grants on behalf of community agencies. However, a critique I wanted to make is that while these activities are crucially necessary, they are not solutions to the broken systems and therefore linguists should go beyond these band-aid solutions to leverage their educational privilege to advocate for policies that fix the unjust aspects of the systems.

The article also included a discussion of AAVE tense-aspect markers that provided aspects of linguistic data and pattern which contributed to the field of sociolinguistics, and this is critically important in highlighting to provide earned value and compensation to the African American community who provided linguists with this data. It notes that narratives from African American youths and adults have been widely adopted both within and without sociolinguistics. As a result of these notations, the careers of faculty and students have risen, but there must be a sense of responsibility to advocate and ally with the individuals whose data and experiences researchers and linguists use.