ABSTRACT
Underlying the educational discourse dealing with issues of language are a number of common assumptions about the nature of language, language structure, language difference, and so on, that are shared by both classroom teachers and the general public. One of the more powerful of these assumptions concerns what counts as a “real” language, and, even more important, what does not count as a “real language.” What is at issue here is what has been called the ideology of linguistic legitimacy: which language varieties are deemed by the society (or some subset of the society) to be legitimate, and which are not. In this chapter, we explore the concept of linguistic legitimacy, and then examine how it applies in three specific cases: African American English (AAE), Spanglish and ASL. After examining these cases, we discuss the implications of the concept of linguistic legitimacy for the world language educator.
