Linguistic Legitimacy and Social Justice

Timothy Reagan is the Dean of the College of Education and Human Development and Professor of Linguistics at The University of Maine, USA. His primary areas of research are applied and educational linguistics, education policy and comparative education, and he has published a dozen books and over 150 journal articles and book chapters.

• Chapter 1: Language and Other Myths: ‘Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt’.- Chapter 2: Conceptualizing the Ideology of Linguistic Legitimacy: ‘Primitive people have primitive languages and other nonsense’.- Chapter 3: African American English, Race and Language: ‘You don’t believe fat meat is greasy’.- Chapter 4: Spanglish in the United States: ‘We speak Spanglish to the dogs, to the grandchildren, to the kids’.- Chapter 5: Sign Language and the DEAF-WORLD: ‘Listening without hearing’.- Chapter 6: Yiddish, the Mame-Loshn: ‘Mensch tracht, Gott lacht’.- Chapter 7: Created and Constructed Languages: ‘I can speak Esperanto like a native’.- Chapter 8: Afrikaans, Language of Oppression to Language of Freedom: ‘Dit is ons erns’.- Chapter 9: Why Language Endangerment and Language Death Matter: ‘Took away our native tongue … And taught their English to our young’.- Chapter 10: Foreign Language Education in the US: ‘But French isn’t a real class!’.- Chapter 11: Linguistic Legitimacy, Language Rights and Social Justice: ‘No one is free when others are oppressed’.