Racialized groups create their own languages to connect identity to home realities

Evidence

Cole reveals that Elemenos are a language as well as racialized and gendered subjects. They have the capacity to “turn not just from black to white, but from brown to yellow to purple to green, and back again” (Senna, 1988:7). Through Elemeno, this “unracialized” invisibility takes a “racialized” linguistic turn. Anzaldua amplifies the function and necessity of a language like Elemeno, or what she calls in a Chicana and Chicano context, “border tongues” (Anzaldua, 1999:77) Anzaldua explains: “for a people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo… what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? A language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to them” (p. 77). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2495

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Anzaldua’s concept of ‘border tongues’ — languages created by non-Anglo people to carry their own realities.
• XREF: Connects to the concept of creoles, pidgins, and code-switching as subaltern linguistic survival strategies found in sociolinguistics literature.