October 16, 2022: A Response to The Hegemony of Standard English: Storying lives bilingually across languages
We are advocates for justice in language rights. Through our explorations of bilingualism we address the hegemony of standard English. We speak from the perspectives of our languages: Black Talk/Ebonics/Slang, Farsi, Fenglish, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Chilean Spanish, Colombian Spanglish, Spanglish, Colloquial Spanish, and standard English. We discuss efforts to respond to various linguistic landscapes from the vantage point of our lived experiences and practices in the United States. We explore ways to integrate languages through improvisation and creativity, beyond the lexical and grammatical rules of a language. We hope to describe our response to standard English to co-exist in the creative use of inter-lingual lives that seek to ensure that the juxtaposition of English therapeutic and daily-life landscapes is integrated into various settings. We discuss the contextual, relational, therapeutic, and training potential offered by bilingualism across various languages as well as the necessary transmutations in theory and practice.