American Indian Culture and Research Journal

What does it mean to “relanguage”? I offer this term as a proposal and an approach toward change within and across disciplinary fields that investigate linguistic form and practice. It addresses the call to “decolonize” the academy while also recognizing the limits of decolonization in settler colonial contexts. Linguistic representations are not in and of themselves pejorative or “racist/racializing” or “colonizing.” Their interpretive framings by audiences and publics—as part of socioculturally, ideologically inflected processes of differentiation and acts of discrimination—result in acts of recognition that may, can, and do perpetuate already-entrenched stances and biases that result in “semiotic marginalization,” the enfigurement and ranking of certain language users as subordinate to other language users (and languages). This is not unfamiliar, but upending these institutionalized and culturally grounded interpretations is difficult. To exemplify relanguaging as a process for addressing semiotic marginalization, I reconsider previous fieldwork in three parts: language documentation, language revitalization, and language in media. I show that relanguaging happens whether or not we recognize it in the moment through the nonconforming voices, perspectives, and linguistic forms that are often the “noise” in a dataset. In tandem with reflexive research and collaboration, relanguaging confronts the marginalizing effects of a white, “Western” gaze.