Chapter 4: “But is it a real language?”: Linguistic Legitimacy and the World Language Teacher

This chapter examines the ideology of linguistic legitimacy, both in its sociological sense and its linguistic sense. It explores a number of selected examples of linguistic legitimacy in the U.S. context, including the debates about African American English and Spanglish. It considers the complex issue of who can be said to “own” a language, in the sense of being empowered to make decisions about what counts as “proper” or “good” linguistic usage. Next, it examines the arguments against the validity of different kinds of linguistic legitimacy. Finally, the chapter discusses language contact language phenomena (as in the case of Spanglish in the U.S.), and considers the implications of such phenomena for the world language classroom.