Thank you all for your comments so far.

The othering of native languages as subordinate and inferior because of (neo)colonial agendas are indeed issues that should be taken into consideration. Thank you Alia Amir for your detailed comment.

Thank you Jinan F. B. Al-Hajaj for your comment. I intentionally left the question vague to see whether one perceives "effects" as positive or negative depending on their research and/or personal experience.

While of course racism is linked with skin colour, there are also other markers which Preeti Oza rightfully observes for the Indian context. Thank you also for pointing this out. Racism is any form of discrimination (which has many historically and spatially distinct examples).

The question is whether being discriminated either systematically or sporadically (as even a single experince in your life might cause a deep trauma for your sense of belonging to a certain community) has any kind of effect to learning and teaching another language?

What can be done to turn these effects into positive motivating factors?

What can we learn from postcolonial studies and critical race studies to tackle racism and its effects?

First of all, let's break down what racism is. Racism at macro policy levels and micro levels are two different things, and will have different kind of impact. At macro level, it comes out in the form of state level policies creating hierarchies among languages. One example, I can give is from my MA level thesis where I compared British India's English language policy and present-day Pakistan's. I found out that colonial discourses about 'English' and 'othering' other indigenous languages of the region were similar to neocolonial discourses of Pakistan's education policy. Pakistan's official language was English stated in the constitution of 1973. Not only English 'others' the other languages, but it also leaves little opportunities for those educated in other mediums of instructions. This then creates less motivation for those languages.

In the famous Minute of Indian education in 1835, Lord Macaulay's explicitly calls the Indian languages as "rude languages". Not just Indian languages but other eastern languages eg Persian misfit for studying science and technology. These colonial ideologies seep deeply in our conscience even now.

At personal level, I believe racism in classrooms and attitude towards the minorities can have a huge impact on student's learning process. When certain groups of people and races are marked as uncivilised even now in 2020 then student learning can get affected by it.

I am Not sure exactly what you mean by ”racism‘s effects on language acquisition”. Generally, education, language learning included, contributes to the efforts exerted to eliminate racism. From a sociolinguistic perspective, we often come across Black English as a response to racism. Less frequently, we hear about Indian English as another response to years of colonization. Nowadays and under the influence of the media, English has a stronghold on the users of social media. If racism exercises an influence on language acquisition, I tend to think that the effects are more positive than negative.

Racism, as any other from of discrimination like untouchability or other marginalization invariably affects language acquisition. In case of academic language acquisition like teaching English as second language, there is an observed and marked indications that the degree of language learning is not the same as the 'majority ' or 'mainstream ' learners.

Thank you all for your comments so far.

The othering of native languages as subordinate and inferior because of (neo)colonial agendas are indeed issues that should be taken into consideration. Thank you Alia Amir for your detailed comment.

Thank you Jinan F. B. Al-Hajaj for your comment. I intentionally left the question vague to see whether one perceives "effects" as positive or negative depending on their research and/or personal experience.

While of course racism is linked with skin colour, there are also other markers which Preeti Oza rightfully observes for the Indian context. Thank you also for pointing this out. Racism is any form of discrimination (which has many historically and spatially distinct examples).

The question is whether being discriminated either systematically or sporadically (as even a single experince in your life might cause a deep trauma for your sense of belonging to a certain community) has any kind of effect to learning and teaching another language?

What can be done to turn these effects into positive motivating factors?

What can we learn from postcolonial studies and critical race studies to tackle racism and its effects?

As a teacher and researcher I have come to understand these issues as purely linguistic concepts and one needs to treat the concepts related to racicism and second language acquisition from two basically different perspectives.I am an Indian and as an English teacher I have faced humiliating situations for not speaking native like spoken English. But over the years after studying Alistair Pennycook's Cultural Politics of English, Henry Giroux,Cangarajaiah, and the CDA framework of Norman Fairclough I have now learnt to accept these issues and concepts as debatable issues .So ,no one can give an opinion or idea which is universally acceptable.You have to decide what your perspective is and then develop your thesis according to your context.

I am so sorry to hear about your experience Siddaramu Thriyambaka

Given the fact that English in South Asia has been used for hundreds of years now; I do see racist attitudes from non South Asian (and even South Asian folks) about South Asian pronunciation and intonation.

Dear Siddaramu Thriyambaka ,

I am also sorry to hear about that. For me accents are part of your character and the more diverse the better.

Sometimes, it is similar here and also quite interestingly different according to who you are. When a non-Turkish person speaks Turkish with a heavily accent, everybody is happy to hear that Turkish is spoken by a non-native speaker. Yet, the vice versa is usually looked down upon.

Hope that these auto-orientalist attitudes will change and people will look more on what you say.

Dear Alia Amir thank you once again, sounds really interesting. Non-native speakers are more sensitive with accents I guess.

Best wishes to both of you,

Murat

Turkish pronunciation can be difficult to master for learners from certain language backgrounds. For Urdu and Farsi speakers, it comes relatively easily as there are overlapping words although pronounced differently.

Dear Alia Amir.

I totally agree with you. The same is valid for Hindi which also bears many similar words (as some words are loanwords in both directions). From the 1930s to the 1980s there was a strong relationship of Turkey with the then Persia, Pakistan and Afghanistan which fluctuted afterwards but it is still strong (but I guess there needs to be more cooperation with academics from the area to work more on the shared culture and language, to increase the number of already written academic works, which I am sure will happen in the future).

Thank you Alia for your reply.

Best wishes,

Murat

Absolutely, I agree. I think it was called RCD. I think it is a pity that land routes of such a rich cultre are not open as possibly were in the past.

I have been tracing the history of Englsh language in the sub-continent, and how English displaced the perso-turkic empire with Persian as their official language. It is fascnatng to read how ‘Urdu’ (Ordu) a Turkish word borrowed from Chagtai became the language of a country!

Dear Alia Amir , exactly, I agree with you, too. Hopefully the rise of the virtual world will help to re-connect the real world.

Best regards,

Murat

I agree. The virtual world has definitely helped the world to reconnect in different ways. Although it does come with a different kind of racism.

Racism is the tendency to view oneself, one's culture, language etc as superior to other people's own. Racism, therefore, does not make allowance for the use of languages rated inferior not to talk of promoting their acquisition. This was the experience of African children in colonial schools. Their speaking of their mother tongues (African indigenous languages) was prohibited in colonial schools. The mistake of using any of the indigenous languages of Africa, dubbed vernaculars, attracted punishment for such one. The colonised were authorised to use only the colonial masters' languages, for example, English in Nigeria and other Anglophone Countries and French in Francophone African countries. This racist attitude succeeded in oppressing African children in this way, instilling in them inferiority complex vis-a-vis their mother tongues and alienating them from their language roots, as equally observed writers like Ngugi Wa Thiongo (1981) and Chinua Achebe (1958). Using Rob Nixon's "Slow violence" the endangerment of many autochthonous African languages and impending language death or extinction can be traced to this despicable phenomenon. Ifeoma Onyemelukwe , in her literary critical book, Colonial, Feminist and Postcolonial Discourses: Decolonisation and Globalisation of African Literature, describes succinctly the negative impact of racism on the acquisition of African indigenous languages in the sub-section: Colonisation Through Endangerment of African Autochthonous Languages.