In U.S. academia, and specifically in writing spaces, the language practice that has long been dominant, is known as Standard Academic English (SAE), which has been used to determine “good” speaking and writing. The normalization of the usage of SAE in academia directly hurts other languages and especially speakers that are multicultural and multilingual, who come into a classroom with an abundance of knowledge. Though to resist language standardization, linguistic justice, a scholarly framework and pedagogical movement, has offered a critique of the violence in standard language ideologies such as SAE. While linguistic justice has opened crucial conversations about language and power, conversations of including various languages often privilege colonial languages like Spanish and leave out those most threatened by erasure such as indigenous languages. I propose rethinking linguistic justice through the lens of buen vivir, a framework from Latin America that is rooted in indigenous thought, to discuss the relationship between linguistic justice and indigenous languages. This research braids theory with lived memory, tracing my personal journey back to the region of la Mixteca in Oaxaca, Mexico to continue learning my indigenous language, Mixteco and finding what living well with Mixteco looks like. Through this personal research, I argue that linguistic justice must stretch beyond inclusion and toward a refusal to forget and work towards a commitment to the languages our ancestors spoke, thought, and felt in. I propose that buen vivir, as a framework and perspective, is needed in linguistic justice to center the reimagining and enactment of living well with our languages. As a result, I provide a recommendation of how to apply this rethinking to pedagogical practice in the field of rhetoric and composition.
Genoveva Vega (Wed,) studied this question.