Language ideologies and speaker categorization: a case study from the U.S. legal system

This study examines a judicial opinion from an appellate court in the District of Columbia, in the United States, using membership categorization analysis. The appeal concerned the absence of an interpreter during the police interrogation of a person suspected of having committed a crime, and whether this absence violated a local law about the provision of interpreters. Deciding this appeal required the court to determine whether the defendant had met a statutory definition of “communication-impaired” persons who are entitled to interpretation services. I argue that, in determining whether the defendant fit into this legal category, the court discursively constructed two linguistic categories that helped support its ultimate disposition of the appeal. These linguistic categories were hierarchically positioned, with English speakers as a default and non-English speakers as somehow deficient or unable to fully function in society. The court’s opinion also contemplated a binary choice of a person being able to communicate in English fully, or not at all, with the possibility that a person might be proficient in English for some purposes, but not others, often presented as a concession or ancillary point. Taken as a whole, the category construction in the opinion suggests an ideology of English monolingualism, which belies a reality of multilingualism, code-shifting, and mixed linguistic identities.