After a brief comparative review of how Canada and Mexico were linguistically colonized, we will establish a working knowledge of the structure and function of language and use it as a lens to examine the social, cultural, and economic forces in the United States that have led to the emergence of language variation based on region, gender, race, ethnicity, and class. We will also explore the ways both informal and institutionalized forms of linguistic discrimination affect the degree of access to education, the labor force, and political institutions available to members of various disenfranchised groups in our society. We will then study the ways with words of poor and working-class Native Americans, African Americans and White Americans who have been linguistically colonized by social, political, and especially educational, institutions designed to serve the needs of upper and middle-class Americans who speak the standard dialect. Finally, in light of the post-1965 immigration of non-European people to this country, we will analyze the multilingual practices of Latino Americans and Asian Americans, paying special attention to the impact of the English Only and the English Plus movements in the process. Throughout the quarter, special interest will also be paid to the practices of code-segregation, code-switching and code-meshing in home, community and school settings.