5 Doing harm with language science

1.5 Doing harm with language science

Modern scientific practices of linguistics have done harm to Indigenous and other minoritized languages. Linguists rely on language users to provide language data, but those who spend their time and energy answering our questions don’t always get much in return. Sometimes linguists gather data to test a particular scientific hypothesis, and the data ends up existing only in obscure scholarly publications when it could also have been made available to the community of language users themselves, for preserving and teaching their language. Sometimes what is merely data to a linguist is a sacred story or includes sensitive personal information, and publishing it might violate someone’s beliefs or privacy. Even if a linguist is careful to work descriptively, there’s a real risk of linguistic and cultural appropriation if they become the so-called authority on the language without being a member of the language community. And sometimes linguists’ attempts at descriptive statements can turn into prescriptive norms: if a linguist writes “In Language X, A is grammatical and B is ungrammatical” based on what they’ve learned from one set of speakers, that observation can become entrenched as the standard variety of Language X, even if there’s another group of speakers out there for whom B is perfectly grammatical.

As a field, linguistics is also responsible for harms to disabled people and their language practices. Deaf kids are often deprived of language input because of oralism, the view that vocal language is more important than signed language. Oralism is prevalent in the field of linguistics, which often fails, like the first edition of this book did, to study or teach the linguistic structures of sign languages. The practice of observing patterns of language across many users, even from a descriptive point of view, has the tendency to identify norms of language use which then makes it all too easy to describe anything that differs from the norm as disordered. For example, Salt (2019) showed that when linguists used standard interview techniques to research autistic people’s conversation, they found “deficits” in their pragmatic abilities. But when the autistic participants were observed in conversation with each other, no such deficits were apparent. Salt concluded that it was the research method itself, namely, the interview, that gave rise to the so-called pragmatic disorders of autism. Similarly, MacKay (2003) reported his experience of aphasia resulting from a stroke. His account eloquently illustrates how the standard diagnostic and treatment techniques ignored his communicative adaptations and treated him as incompetent.

What’s the lesson for us, then, as 21st-century linguists? I’m going to aim for some humility in my scientific thinking. I love using the tools of science to observe language. But I try to remember that science is one way of knowing, which brings its own cognitive biases. In other words, doing linguistics is not a neutral exercise. One of the fundamental lessons of this book is to move from thinking about grammar as a set of prescriptive rules in a book to seeing grammar as a living thing in our minds. But let’s not get stuck in that way of thinking either. In addition to thinking about language as something that lives in the individual minds of individual humans, let’s also remember that language is something that lives in communities and is shared among users, in the conversations we have and the stories we tell.

Adapted from:

Anderson, C., Bjorkman, B., Denis, D., Doner, J., Grant, M., Sanders, N. & Taniguchi, A. (2022). Essentials of Linguistics. Pressbooks. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/essentialsoflinguistics2/