Ungrammatical Selves

Abstract

If asked about my first impression of linguistics as a discipline, I would extol its generosity. I enrolled in an introductory class—a decade ago—with no knowledge of what it meant to study language, wielding only a relatively good grasp of English. One of the foremost principles taught to us undergraduates was that linguists are not prescriptive; rather, they take a descriptivist approach to language data. Later in the class, we would learn that formal linguists depend on speaker judgements of grammaticality to theorise how humans cognise the rules of language, a Chomskyan view of linguistic competence. Such a revelation was at odds with the ways in which I learned English and Mandarin Chinese before university, where I was explicitly taught and evaluated based on my ability to follow grammatical rules. Ungrammaticality in linguistics, I learned, is necessary and productive to advance the field. What a generous, welcoming discipline that welcomes deviations, I remember thinking.

Ten years and two degrees in linguistics later, it became clear to me that while ungrammaticality in language is embraced by linguists, ungrammaticality in linguists is not. By this, I mean that the welcoming of ‘broken’ rules in language is not extended to linguists themselves, many of whom are deemed infelicitous because of who they are and how they produce language. Inclusion in Linguistics hinges on the observation that the discipline does not always confront the borders that it draws, even if a significant portion of its research scope attends to the human condition and the social world. The edited volume is assembled with contributions from an impressive range of language scholars and practitioners who have been part of, or have witnessed, the limits of linguistics and linguists. These contributors do not merely demonstrate the invisible ways in which individuals and communities can be left and kept out of the discipline, but also itemise in concrete steps suggestions for allies to recognise and rectify this exclusion. Their suggestions for action are easily adaptable for both teaching and research contexts, and it is more than heartening to witness the commitment of the contributors to ensuring that others will not have to undergo the same exclusionary experiences that they have. While there have been other academic projects that are similarly reflexive in their discussion of the field of linguistics, Inclusion in Linguistics carves out a distinct space for contributors to share what they think can be done better, and how to implement truly inclusive practices for all users, teachers and learners of language. I suspect that for some readers, this volume would be their first confrontation of the tangible barriers that linguists have put up for their own peers and (potential) students. There is little meaning to assuming that those who have been exclusionary do so intentionally; many of them are also subjects of an insularity that plagues academia itself. But blind spots or otherwise, there is clearly a need for contemplation and change. In addition to my recapitulation of the many worthy chapters of Inclusion in Linguistics, I also wish to comment on the ungrammatical nature of both language and language users themselves, evincing the particular obsession of linguistics in articulating rules and disciplining rule breakers.

It is easy to find books about linguistics as an academic subject, but less so about linguistics as a community of students, teachers and researchers. This is probably because it takes linguists to write about other linguists, and there is much difficulty to do so reflexively. The edited volume Linguistics Out of the Closet (Kibbey 2023), a comparable project published a year before Inclusion in Linguistics, brings together reflexive essays that tackle the oft-dismissed role of gender and sexuality in linguistics as a discipline (see Pak 2025 for a discussion). One of its highlights is the showcasing of linguistics as a field that can turn on itself, laying bare the ways in which disciplinary anxieties reveal themselves through the legitimisation of some scholars at the expense of others. Inclusion in Linguistics shares this reflexivity with a broader scope, covering dimensions of inclusion such as race, disability and class. Four major themes and 20 chapters structure the volume: intersectional inclusion, institutional repair, equitable linguistics classrooms and community engagement. The editors, Anne Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson and Mary Bucholtz (2024), state in no ambiguous terms that the volume is committed to addressing both issues of and solutions to disciplinary exclusion for linguists, students and other stakeholders. Not only do the contributors achieve this goal robustly, they sometimes do so at personal cost. Writing about inclusion necessitates the confrontation of exclusion, and this can be jeopardising for those who choose to critique power. This is also what makes the volume such an original and essential one—it evinces deep-seated blind spots that have otherwise been glossed over, sometimes even maintained, by those in positions of influence.

Inclusion in Linguistics wants to offer an obvious but overlooked perspective of linguistics: that it is at its core a (flawed) community. Perhaps this is most salient in Part 1, where contributors draw on their selves to articulate how intersecting factors of disability, race, gender and locale can be mobilised against scholars of language themselves. Through five chapters, we become privy to how some figures in linguistics are revered for who they are and what they study, while others are left out for the very same reasons. These reasons are at times arbitrary (such as one's field of specialisation) and other times, systematic (such as one's doctoral institution). Part 2 broadens its view to consider underrepresented students, first-generation and Global South scholars and those in smaller linguistics subfields. Particularly, Punnoose and Haneefa (2024) document their experiences at linguistic programmes in India to critique the narrow view of what counts as linguistics, a question that is persistent for many who choose qualitative approaches to language studies. Linguistics is a community that is also made possible by its students, and Part 3 of the volume consists of essays that suggest how the classroom can do better by its occupants. It has a solid pedagogical focus across the chapters, demonstrating concretely the steps to take in order to maximise the accessibility of linguistics for students of all backgrounds. The most modest section of the volume is Part 4, where the contributors, including stakeholders outside of academia, present case studies of linguistic justice beyond the traditional classroom.

The editors and contributors of the volume accomplish with aplomb the mission of inverting the researcher's gaze. The difficulty in doing so lies not in the lack of data, but articulating the humbling recognition of the discipline's self-limiting tendencies. Embarrassingly, these limits are sometimes imposed by some of linguistics’ brightest minds who draw circles around themselves, insisting on insularity when it has always been external contact and collaboration that has propelled human knowledge. They have created rules for a game that few are interested to play. I want to draw attention to a particular aspect of language—and linguistics itself—that exemplifies this silly rule-making and breaking: ungrammaticality.

Much of formal linguistics depends on ungrammaticality to advance linguistic research, particularly in syntax and semantics. As Abrusán (2019, 347) puts it, ‘We find out how things work when they are broken’. In itself, ungrammaticality is neutral, and not the negative phenomenon that pedants will have us believe it is. It simply is a reflection of utterances that do not follow what is normatively designated as correct. Ungrammaticality, however, became a point of contention that germinated into transphobic sentiments expressed by a highly respected figure in the field, as detailed by Miles-Hercules (2024) and Dockum and Green (2024) in the volume. Taking to the internet to inveigh against the use of the singular pronominal they as a gender-neutral pronoun, the figure's words began a series of conversations surrounding misgendering, trans exclusion and ‘prescriptivist Stalinism’ (Pullum 2017). It is curious that the defence against accusations of misgendering is centred around ungrammaticality, which I have mentioned to be rather beneficial to linguists. If linguists can admit that ungrammaticality is productive insofar as it reifies its counterpart—grammaticality—that we rely on to theorise the operations of language and cognition, why is it wielded as a tool of exclusion for linguists themselves? Discourses of ungrammaticality surrounding non-binary and gender-neutral language do not start and end with this anecdote. Opponents of non-normative genders have long pointed to the ‘weirdness’ or ‘complexity’ of trans and non-binary pronouns and identity labels that are seemingly at odd with the general consensus on what is considered sensible language. Because trans and non-binary language is syntactically and semantically unintuitive to some, its negative treatment fractally recurs on a larger scale to delegitimise people who use that language.

This is a common thread that runs through many of the chapters in Inclusion in Linguistics. Such tactics of delegitimisation extend beyond genderqueer communities to include any community that is deemed as producing disordered, ungrammatical language. Look no further than the very first chapter in the volume, written by the late Jonathan Henner. A key scholar in the field of Crip Linguistics, Henner's work was dedicated to advancing an alternate and more equitable move to ‘analyze disability as a variationist perspective to languaging’ (Henner 2024, 21). His experiences as a deaf linguist who worked on signed languages allowed him to see how language produced by disabled persons is often viewed as deficient and disordered, second to the language spoken by abled bodies. As he argues cogently, ‘language cannot be disordered, but bodies can be disordered in such a way that affects languaging’ (Henner 2024, 21). If there is no such thing as disordered language—if all of language is merely variation—then why is the same generosity denied from language users themselves? Rule breaking amongst linguists is not treated with the same reception as rule breaking in linguistics. Those who are perceived as out of line are censured and viewed as undisciplined; for instance, linguists who do ‘unlinguistic’ research as qualitative researchers (Jesus 2024; Punnoose and Haneefa 2024), or linguists who do not graduate from elite linguistics programmes in the United States (Dockum and Green 2024). Ungrammaticality has long been weaponised against speakers of ‘non-standard’ English (Cushing 2023), particularly among those who are subjects of raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores and Rosa 2015; Rosa and Flores 2017). These linguistic outlaws break rules of language and what it means to be a language user, producing ungrammatical selves that are disciplined by those who claim superiority as gatekeepers of language.

There is something markedly uncharitable about denouncing prescriptivism while simultaneously deploying it to deny one's peer a seat at the table. As various chapters in Inclusion in Linguistics demonstrate, there are, apparently, rules to being a linguist. Despite establishing a longstanding foundation on prizing ungrammaticality as a core feature of language science, linguists do not celebrate rule-breaking among themselves. They value ‘bounding an entity [that] creates other entities that lie outside the boundary’ (Henner 2024, 27), even if interdisciplinarity is often stated to be sought after by search committees in linguistics departments globally. After receiving linguistics training at both undergraduate and doctoral levels, and choosing to specialise in the qualitative study of discourses, I am repeatedly made aware that my work is not ‘linguisticky’ enough for some departments (see Barrett and Hall 2023 for why this is especially so for scholars in language, gender and sexuality); it may not even be ‘sociolinguisticky’ enough for institutions that view sociolinguistics only as variationist work. I would go on to encounter similar borders at anthropology departments, who will only consider linguistic anthropologists who have received training in anthropology. There are rules I have learned about only after breaking them. Exclusion is a squandering of energy that could be otherwise expended to further the field through collaboration, made evident precisely by the contributions to Inclusion in Linguistics. Theirs is proof that there is not only merit in cooperating within linguistics, but also, more crucially, humanity in doing so.

But even a volume like this one cannot fully capture inclusion at all levels, despite its good intentions. The editors have tried to build a foundation by describing in the introduction how they ‘aimed to create a maximally inclusive process for developing and editing this volume’ (Mallinson et al. 2024, 12), and it is evidently a tall order. One of these ways of inclusion is by reaching out to potential contributors ‘across career stages, paths, institutions, and geographic locations’ (Mallinson et al. 2024, 12). It would therefore be remiss of me not to point out that of all the higher education institutions associated with the editors and contributors, only one is located in the Global South. There is an overwhelming centricity on the North American experience of linguistics that is left unacknowledged in the volume, despite its commitment to inclusion and decolonisation in the field; Borba (2026) observes the same in his critical reading of the companion volume, Decolonizing Linguistics, by the same editors. This in no way minimises the quality of the essays featured, or the experiences and suggestions shared by the contributors. The omission does, however, feed into the persistent designation of North American institutions as the holy grail for linguists trained and based outside of that region. I have been trained at excellent universities in Singapore and the United Kingdom, but North America—particularly the United States—has always maintained its aspirational position as where one must graduate and later seek employment from. Even at interviews for tenure-track employment, I have been warned that my non-US training may not help my odds. What does it take for those outside of North America (and white-settler geographies) to see themselves in such systems? What does it take for these systems to see them?

Of course, such a blind spot is not particular to this volume or linguistics itself. Queer theory—a field that has dominated the humanities for its commitments and contributions to antinormativity—is also infamously selective in who they allow to be part of its coterie. Jung (2024, 7) astutely observes that the core of its exclusion lies not in ‘the institutional gap between wealthy, privileged universities and the rest of the institutions in the U.S., but rather the geographical gap between the privileged place of the U.S. and the rest of the world’. As I read each chapter of Inclusion in Linguistics and moved on to the next, I found myself wondering not about whether there might be an author from an Asian or African institution, but what the volume might discuss if it were assembled outside of the Global North. Might inclusion then include perspectives held by scholars that do not and cannot share the same theories and experiences of marginalisation produced by North American structures? How should we understand inclusivity if we are not ‘interpreting’ and ‘applying’ and ‘adapting’ the knowledge offered by the Global North (Jung 2024; see also Banda 2026)? These questions come to mind after reading this volume, but perhaps they should not have.

There is much to celebrate with the publication of Inclusion in Linguistics. The courage of the contributors is palpable through the pages, and there is a formidable scope of identities, contexts and locales that the editors have managed to showcase. It is a volume that is long overdue. With hope, it will reach the individuals and institutions that sorely need it, as well as those who are in positions to enact change. There will continue to be ungrammatical linguists, ungrammatical linguistics students and ungrammatical language users from all around the world who break and bend the rules. Our task, then, is seeing them as equally productive as ungrammatical language.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.