Racial categories and racialized designations of intra-population difference vary across cultural and national contexts and are operationalized both within communities and externally--at the level of national policy and discourse, as well as by researchers. This paper presents a review sociolinguistic literature in which racialized terms are deployed: from foundational studies on linguistic comparisons between “black” and “white” vernaculars in the U.S. (Labov 1972; Fasold 1981; Wolfram 1971;), to work in which discrete U.S. racial categories are problematized (Blake 2014; Bucholtz 2011; Cutler 2008; Fix 2014; Holliday 2016; Sweetland 2002), to work that examines multi-ethnic and immigrant community language practices in Canada, UK and Europe (Cheshire et al 2011; Nagy et al. 2014; Rampton 1995, Sharma 2011). We explore the ways in which racial and ethnic categorizations emerged and have become reified within their cultural context, but also through the vehicle of our scholarship.
Sociolinguistic studies often employ etic categories to communities because of their official status at a national/governmental level and for the purpose of cross-study comparison (Yaeger-Dror & Cieri 2014). We argue that while seemingly useful, etic categories of racial difference are inherently flawed, as they reinforce hegemonic discourses about racial difference. When operationalizing etic categories of racial and ethnic difference, categorizations of both language and race are simplified in service of the maintenance of the status quo and the power elite (Beltrán 2010).
Some sociolinguistic work over the recent decades has rejected etic categorizations of race and ethnicity in favor of emic categories: those operationalized within communities based on community ideologies regarding metrics of color, heritage, culture, and language. Researchers argue that such designations allow for nuanced work, more reflective of the complexity of the individual and reflective of community practice. However, we argue that the researcher is best informed by both emic and etic designations, and the interplay between the two, as consideration of the externally-imposed ideologies affects the ways race and racialized difference is understood and internalized at the community-level. By exploring this interplay, we gain a better understanding of how power, identity, and language are at play at the level of the individual.
