‘Speak proper English’: coloniality, linguistic legitimacy, and language socialisation across migration among Afro-Anglophone Caribbean students

Migration can reposition speakers within new regimes of linguistic legitimacy even when their linguistic competence has not diminished. This narrative study examines how seven Afro-Anglophone Caribbean (AAC) students developed understandings of linguistic legitimacy through pre-migration language socialisation and renegotiated those understandings after migration to the United States. Drawing on two semi-structured interviews over 24 months, the study traces accounts of language, family, and schooling across Caribbean and U.S. contexts. Participants associated Caribbean vernaculars with family, community, and belonging while linking standardised English to schooling, professionalism, and social mobility. Their narratives demonstrate that family and school practices communicated hierarchies of linguistic legitimacy before migration. Drawing on World Englishes, postcolonial and coloniality perspectives, and raciolinguistics, the findings show that migration did not initiate linguistic hierarchy but reorganised historically formed understandings of linguistic legitimacy as participants encountered expectations surrounding American English, pronunciation, and intelligibility. The findings illustrate how linguistic legitimacy is geographically and institutionally contingent and how formed relations of linguistic authority may be rearticulated as speakers move across contexts. By foregrounding pre-migration language socialisation, the study extends understandings of migrant language experiences and argues for language education that expands access to institutionally powerful language practices without positioning students’ linguistic repertoires as deficient.