Keywords
communication
modernity
colonialism
race
racialization
simple communication
monolingual
How to Cite
Abstract
This paper presents a new theoretical framework for analyzing linguistic power relations and it examines the linguistic effects of what Anibal Quijano has called coloniality of power. The coloniality of language refers to a process of racialization of colonized people as communicating agents (ie, as potential interlocutors) that begins with the conquest of America and nowadays. The research focuses on the dehumanization of the colonized and enslaved populations, and the concomitant contempt of their languages and social ways of making sense, interpreted as expressions of his inferior ‘nature’. The results are an original contribution to the debate on the historical relationship between colonialism, race, ethnicity, and language in America. The argument suggests that there is a connection between the reduction of the colonized and racialized populations to a status of non-humans, as well as a monolingual linguistic ideology that hides colonial oppression dialogically and discursively.
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