Retrieving the Body in Linguistics

Seeing Inclusion in Linguistics begin with Jon Henner's (2024) chapter on crip linguistics feels like a long-overdue correction. Traditionally, linguistics textbooks treat sign language as an “add-on” near the final pages, whereas disability is cordoned off within clinical sciences, including clinical linguistics, as if disabled people's languaging experiences have nothing to do with non-disabled linguistics. My experience teaching “clinical linguistics and social justice” at our department has shown me how vital it is to blur these boundaries; I have watched students transition from a purely medical audiological background to a multimodal study of phonological variation among deaf learners. The editors’ decision to place this framework at the forefront is a powerful reclamation of space, and it is the lens through which I will anchor my discussion in this commentary. Henner's chapter left a question that remains unresolved: If crip linguistics invites us to value all disabled ways of languaging, then how can we critique linguistic deprivation without reproducing deficit narratives about those deprived of it (p. 32)? Language deprivation, by definition, is a label given to “a host of different cognitive, social, and behavioral challenges that arise from none-to-incomplete access to a natural language during formative years” (Robinson and Henner 2017, 1424). Examples include deaf children who are denied access to sign language and receive only partial access to spoken language due to the sensory incompatibility between speech phonetics and their auditory capacities, resulting in the development of cognitive functions—such as executive control—that differ from those of children who have full access to a natural language (Hall et al. 2017). As crip linguistics ontologically removes any negative framing of body-mind differences manifested through ways of languaging, a critique of language deprivation grounded in a negative ontology—one that presupposes delayed or deviant cognitive development as its consequence—risks tripping up its own agenda. This tension, however, illustrates the embodied nature of language, as emphasized by Henner and by recent calls for an embodied sociolinguistics (Bucholtz and Hall 2016). Although it is almost a cliché in introductory linguistics to educate students that all languages and varieties are equal, in practice some remain “more equal than others.” Linguistic differences that stem from body-mind types falling below a socially defined standard deviation from the “average” body-mind are typically deemed unfit to stand on the same podium of equality. Of course, variation exists within that statistically “normal” range of body-minds, and such variation also affects language. Yet these differences are rarely subject to negative framing, precisely because they constitute the statistical majority and the socially dominant. This, in essence, is the social model of disability: Disability is a form of structural oppression imposed upon body-minds that have not been politically absorbed into the lifestyles, built environments, and institutional norms defined by those in power. For those outside the norm, body-mind differences become objects of scientific scrutiny, and their causal relationship with language is disproportionally emphasized. Following such logic to justify the harms of linguistic deprivation inevitably falls into the same trap it seeks to expose. One way to debug this is to retrieve the body in linguistics, recognizing that every person languages from a body. In fact, in the chapter, Henner cites Charity Hudley's lived experience of losing part of a lung to highlight how speakers of the same language can nonetheless be constrained by their bodily capacities, and how Hudley came to realize that so much of who she was and how she was perceived depended on a single organ that produced, amplified, and propelled speech (p. 22). To retrieve the body in linguistics is therefore essential: Language is always embodied. From my own experience as a second-language speaker of English, this claim is deeply relatable. Every time I finish a long English conversation, I can feel a tangible discomfort in the muscles around and inside my mouth, as well as fatigue from the intense concentration required to listen. These embodied sensations, of course, also exist in first-language production; we simply become so habituated to them that we forget there is always a body operating whenever we language. When we retrieve the body in linguistics, we can more clearly perceive how many linguistic and political interventions are, in fact, acts of external force upon the body. If most of us would agree that physical violations of the body are intolerable, then by the same reasoning, coercive interventions into language should also intuitively warrant resistance. In this sense, language deprivation, as its name suggests, can be understood as a deprivation of the body itself. Even without invoking the ontology of body-mind, its ethical problems become self-evident. On the basis of this understanding, the following discussion unfolds. Reading Henner's chapter alongside Figueroa's (2024) contribution in Decolonizing Linguistics offers a revealing contrast that sheds light on the question at hand. Figueroa critiques the long-standing racist notion of the “language gap” in psycholinguistics, exposing how standardized language assessments presume certain forms of linguistic input to be of higher quality than others. Children from racialized backgrounds are framed as “at risk” for language development—inviting deficit discourses, medical intervention, and in some cases being “even falsely labeled disabled” (p. 169). The discourse of the language gap thus becomes a site where race and disability intersect, producing a racialized experience of disability. Like some other decolonial efforts to dismantle deficit narratives surrounding racialized language use (Wolfram 1993), Figueroa argues that all children will acquire a language—whether from their home or from peers—thereby refuting the very premise of a “gap.” This strategy of affirming a fully fledged linguistic faculty aims to challenge the colonizer's epistemic misrecognition of colonized voices. However, this decolonial move seems to sit uneasily with crip linguistics, which argues that there is no inherently “bad” form of languaging—complete or otherwise. A crucial tension emerges here: When we claim that a person's linguistic ability has been misrecognized as a disability due to racism, we are simultaneously presupposing that some other forms of linguistic ability can be correctly evaluated as disabled. Given how linguistic disability is typically determined through standardized language tests by whether one's performance falls a certain number of standard deviations below the mean, if we acknowledge that such tests are themselves colonially inflected instruments, grounded in the cultural norms of specific racial and class groups, then an inconsistency arises. The only way to justify why these tools should not pathologize the linguistic differences of racialized minorities yet still legitimately diagnose others as linguistically disordered is to assume that the latter group shares the same social, racial, and cultural background as the norms on which the tests are based. This politics of resistance challenges a system through another normative system. In doing so, it not only marginalizes and re-pathologizes those disabled ways of languaging that cannot easily be systematized, but also inadvertently reinscribes the very linguistic and racial boundaries it seeks to dismantle. A context I find analytically comparable is the case of Vietnamese rural women who, through commercial brokerage, married Taiwanese men from rural, working-class backgrounds. In the uneven regional political economy of the 1990s, “marrying up” to a more industrialized economy functioned as a household poverty-alleviation strategy in some Southeast Asian countries. These women were uprooted from their natal communities and expected to bear heirs for the husband's family. Under raciolinguistic discrimination and without Mandarin proficiency, many mothers were discouraged or prohibited from using Vietnamese with their children and thus compelled to parent in limited Mandarin. Media and official discourses then framed “Southeast Asian mothers” as increasing children's risk for language and developmental delay. If we respond with a system-against-system move—blaming standardized tests for lacking cultural sensitivity—we miss something crucial. One medical study, for example, reported that children of commercially brokered marriages were 8.72 times more likely to be diagnosed with developmental delays than those from love matches or kin-arranged transnational marriages (Chou 2010). Pointing out the tests’ cultural bias cannot account for this pattern. Looking closely at the marriage form reveals a configuration of structural conditions: Husbands are often near 40, employed in labor-intensive sectors, facing marriage-market disadvantage, and patrilineal pressure to produce heirs; limited childcare support from the husband's family; mothers are linguistically isolated and explicitly discouraged from using their L1 (Liang et al. 2020). In at least some cases, children's developmental delays resemble language deprivation: The body-mind difference is real, but it is artifactual as a product of violent social arrangements that suppress early, accessible input in the mother's language. Does the fact that some children may indeed meet “correct” diagnostic criteria make their pathologization unproblematic? This returns us to Henner's question: How do we name linguistic deprivation as harmful without appealing to the “good” or “bad” of the resulting language? In his manifesto co-authored with Octavian Robinson, Henner addresses this tension by arguing that the language of linguistically deprived deaf children “was impaired by their material conditions and environmental factors, but their language is not disordered because they are deaf children that would naturally gravitate to signed language and multimodal avenues of communication” (Henner and Robinson 2023, 14–15). To put it simply, as implied by the notion of deprivation, the resulting language of these children is an artifact rather than something naturally induced by deafness. As Henner himself acknowledges, if all languaging practices are to be treated as equally valid, then invoking the “impaired performance” of linguistically deprived children to demonstrate the evil of deprivation would contradict the very ethos of crip linguistics. The challenge, therefore, is to identify an alternative moral logic—one that condemns linguistic deprivation not by contrasting performances but by interrogating the material and political conditions that make deprivation possible in the first place. As many authors in both Inclusion in Linguistics and Decolonizing Linguistics point out, the notion of the Global South can be productive in problematizing what linguistics as a field has or has not achieved (e.g., Medina 2024; Hou and Ali 2024; Punnoose and Haneefa 2024). Viewed through the lens of Southern theory, critical disability studies reminds us that disability in the Global South must be understood through the histories of colonial and imperial violence that have disabled bodies (Connell 2011; Meekosha 2011). For example, Vietnamese veterans with amputated limbs are “disabled” as a continuation of the Vietnam War; for Indigenous peoples in settler colonies, land dispossession generates psychic injuries later pathologized as “mental disorders.” In such cases, merely de-pathologizing body–mind difference through the social model of disability does not crip the structure that disables these body-minds. It would therefore be politically problematic to equalize all body–mind differences labeled as “disability,” as though the contexts that produce them were equivalent. To think about linguistic deprivation in this frame is to locate it as a form of body–mind difference born of the medicalization of hearing and the oralist “crusade” against signed language (Valente 2011). This is not to claim that deaf people live under conditions politically identical to colonial violence, but Southern theory provides an alternative orientation: It moves us away from debating whether the language faculty is “fully developed” at the surface level of communication and toward confronting the violent genesis of deprivation itself—where a body–mind difference becomes a human-made artifact through systemic intervention. Together with Southern theory, “social suffering” can be another useful concept to highlight the mechanisms through which social forces become embodied as individual experience (Farmer 1996). When body-mind difference is itself a human-made artifact of systemic violence, it is both ethically and empirically impossible to neutralize that difference without erasing the violence that produced it. From this perspective, the linguistic performance resulting from language deprivation—within the variationist ontology inherited by crip linguistics—carries no ontological good or bad. Yet, when an individual cannot use language to the degree necessary for expressing thought, they are more likely to enter a condition of suffering. This suffering is not from any inherent deficit but a socially produced artifact, rooted in structural violence that has denied early access to sign language. My interviewee Wei-Fei, born deaf into a low-income family, exemplifies this impasse. Without access to early intervention programs—let alone the institutional possibility of sign language—he grew up during the 1990s, when Taiwan's policy of inclusive education replaced segregated schools for the deaf. As a result, he grew up unable to use spoken language effectively. When attempting simple self-introductions or greetings in Mandarin, strangers often assumed he was speaking Cantonese or Japanese. Communication became possible only through writing—on paper or on the palm of his hand—single words or short phrases. Even in the age of instant messaging, his written messages remain noticeably distinct from those of hearing users. Wei-Fei is, in every sense, a victim of language deprivation. Unable to verbally defend himself, he endured severe physical and relational bullying throughout his schooling, as well as social isolation and academic failure—despite exceptional mathematical ability. He was first exposed to sign language only in college, by which time language acquisition was no longer as accessible as it would have been in childhood. His case makes it clear that he has not merely experienced deprivation but embodied suffering. At this point, it becomes evident that to ask, as a linguist, whether his speech is “good” or “bad,” or whether it might constitute a sociolect (Dumas 2012; see Wan 2021), is to miss the moral core of his condition of social suffering. Producing body-mind differences through social engineering is, at its core, a form of violence. It treats human beings as experimental material rather than as lives with dignity. The Mandarin-only policy in Taiwan, for instance, has left many elderly speakers of local languages isolated. They cannot comprehend the content of most media produced in Mandarin, but they clearly perceive the social exclusion it implies (Lin 2009). Such linguistic alienation surely heightens the risk of mental distress and illness. A clinical study (Liu et al. 2015) documents three Taiwanese Alzheimer's patients who were low-proficiency multilingual in the colonial languages—Japanese and Mandarin. Their delusions were closely intertwined with the colonial languages they had largely not used after the onset of the disease. One elderly woman's delusions worsened whenever her son spoke Mandarin on the phone, as she thought he was abandoning her. Her condition improved only after her son moved her back to a rural area where people spoke Taiwanese—the language she could fully understand. This reminds me of my own Hakka-speaking grandmother, whose limited Mandarin proficiency became a quiet burden in her later years. After developing Parkinson's disease, her delusions deepened sometimes when we spoke Mandarin around her. She would suddenly grow angry, convinced we were speaking ill of her or plotting to sell her house. Things softened after Yasih, an Indonesian caregiver who had worked in that Hakka-speaking town for over a decade, took over her care. Yasih spoke Hakka more fluently than many of us younger family members, and most importantly, she understood most of my grandmother's words. Because of her, my grandmother could once again live in a world of words she recognized. Her final months, though fragile, were peaceful. It is not that the resulting body-mind differences themselves are inherently bad. Rather, what is horrible is the systemic violence that produces such differences on a mass scale—treating entire populations as test subjects in a social experiment. Language policies that forcibly impose a language while suppressing other ones are not merely erasures of linguistic diversity; they are large-scale experiments on human cognition, emotion, and social being. In the book, Punnoose and Haneefa (2024), in their discussion of linguistic scholarship in India, observe that English occupies an ambivalent legal position—it simultaneously connects and divides, widening the gap between elites and the vast majority. They criticize how mainstream linguistics in India treats language as an object of study detached from its users and their social realities. Similarly, Bender and Grissom II (2024) remind us that language technology has developed in a landscape dominated by corporate and military interests, urging linguists to confront this colonizing mindset within natural language processing and its infrastructures. I would like to conclude by extending Jon Henner's question about linguistic deprivation—that its harm lies in the deprivation process itself. Any language policy, or any social engineering project involving language, constitutes a large-scale human experiment on the body-mind. As Henner reminds us, language is always embodied; it is through our bodies that we language and live. 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