Minoritized and Majoritized Bilingualism

​I haven't read it yet (please let it be summer), but the new book by Jamie Schissel called "Social Consequences of Testing for Language-minoritized Bilinguals in the United States" looks really interesting. She, along with others in bilingual studies (e.g., Sánchez, García, & Solorza, 2018) use the term "language-minoritized bilinguals". This is a useful term as it recognizes that some bilingual children, youth, and adults speak a home or dominant language that is minoritized or majoritized, which in turn alters how their bilingualism is viewed and valued by society. While I like this term, it seems to me that is has the unintended effect of reducing bilingual people to language users, which is similar to the criticism often levied against terms like English learner and English language learner, which reduce humans to language learners.

Perhaps a more parsimonious term would just modify the word 'bilingual(ism)'. Thus we get the terms 'minoritized bilingual(ism)' and 'majoritized bilingual(ism)'. Doing this recognizes that, raciolinguistically, bilinguals in the United States face minoritization along lines that move beyond language and into race, as Jonathan Rosa's new book aptly points out. 

I don't lay claim to this terminology as I am sure others have used it, or described it. As always, I have more reading and learning to do, but if we are going to move our understanding of bilingualism further, we need to take an intersectional perspective that is reflected in our lexicons.