If you’re writing a story, for example, about something that you did with your grandmother speaks Spanish, you, as the author, can decide to use Span… - Nelson Flores

we can trace the discourses of semilingualism back to the origins of European colonialism. That’s something that Jonathan [Rosa] and I wrote about in our 2017 piece, which is essentially one of the primary mechanisms for dehumanizing indigenous populations, African populations, by calling into question their language practices and suggesting that their language practices were somehow illegitimate or subhuman.

Whenever we talk about social and academic language today, that’s really the legacy that we’ve inherited – a legacy of semilingualism, of suggesting that there’s something illegitimate about the language practices of racialized bilingual students.

anthropology has shown us, for decades, that regardless of how many words people may or may not be hearing, that they’re being socialized into complex practices.