As scholars who seek to decenter normative modes of language learning and use in (applied) linguistic theory and practice, and as individuals whose own language practices have been labeled as disordered and atypical, we read Flores and Rosa's undoing of competence in applied linguistics as a call for the rejection of competence and related essentialist constructs in linguistics.

We begin with Flores and Rosa's argument that language boundaries (e.g., what makes “English” perceived and labeled as different from “Spanish”) are colonial constructs; in other words, myths disguised as social facts. In a world where language boundaries are established politically, “unbounded language” centers the individual's ability to navigate various discourses in multilingual and multimodal contexts. While rejections of boundedness have often been only considered relevant in exoticized contexts (i.e., prefixed as multi–), this theoretical move is more transformative and more widely applicable than some linguists might expect. For example, treating boundaries as socially constructed—as opposed to natural analytic objects—allows linguists to stop wallowing in false dichotomies such as gesture versus sign (Lepic & Occhino, 2018), to stop worrying about drawing boundaries between linguistic and nonlinguistic communication (Moriarty Harrelson, 2019), and even to stop categorizing language as disordered or not (Henner & Robinson, 2021).

Flores and Rosa have pointed out that consistency across languagers does not exist even in languages that are presumed to be bounded (cf. Kidd et al., 2018). Relatedly, Cheng et al. (2022) found that “nativeness” is inadequate when it comes to predicting consistent language experience and behavior in experimental contexts. Alongside contending with the white supremacist origins of these terms, this requires scholars to reject the notion that “monolingual,” “native speaker/signer,” and possibly even “modality” can be useful analytic objects. Rather, these are better thought of as language ideologies or language-ideological assemblages (Birkeland et al., 2022) that are (re)produced by the sociohistorical contexts in which these terms and associated thinking emerged.

Recognizing that variation is the norm and that idealized languaging is theoretical is just the first step. The crucial next step is for all work on language to meaningfully address its alignment with an idealized version of a language. Because no one uses the idealized language, scholars must also recognize that typical development is not typical. Language development is highly variable, and people who do not align with these very specific and politicized parameters are quickly labeled deviant, disordered, disabled, or not competent. Indeed, the rejections of competence, boundedness, and homogeneity advocated by Flores and Rosa provide even more fertile theoretical ground for rejecting “disordered” as a valid description of language practices because the relevant structures of oppression have similar sources.

Flores and Rosa's perspective from educational linguistics is critical for all of linguistics. Schools are sites of state violence that reproduce and reinforce racist, sexist, ableist, classist, and other oppressive ideologies via curriculum and assessment planning. Attempts to reduce frictions between identity borders like racial desegregation often reproduce the violence that necessitated desegregation in the first place. For example, the desegregation policies enacted after Brown v. Board of Education destroyed the schools that were the center of various Black communities. These schools had centered Black cultures and ways of languaging and created a Black middle class of teachers, principals, and superintendents. Desegregation removed these schools, the associated jobs, and affirmatory spaces (Horsford, 2010). In white schools, Black ways of languaging and behavior are heavily policed. Black students are overrepresented in specialized education and underrepresented in gifted programs. As Flores and Rosa point out, competence as it is applied in schooling is a function of these institutions being rooted in white supremacist policies. By virtue of being nonwhite, racialized students are presumed incompetent (Love & Beneke, 2021). This is where racialization intersects disability because, when competence is a byproduct of ability, and both are seen as essential characteristics, lack of competence is labeled “disability.”

Flores and Rosa have made an additional argument, which we read to be directed at the field of linguistics: Because the constructs underpinning most approaches to (socio)linguistics in the United States share an ideological basis with institutional discrimination, linguists who are invested in social justice and decoloniality must also commit to interrogating theoretical assumptions such as competence, innateness, nativeness, and boundedness—along with recognizing that a topic such as “typical” language development is a construct at all. By virtue of being tied to these constructs, either explicitly or implicitly, recruiting participants for a study on sentential focus in American English, tracking the acquisition of verbal morphology in British Sign Language, or determining subgroupings for South Dravidian are all contexts where social justice is relevant. The burden of proof is on those linguists who are invested in the theoretical status of these constructs to argue for their utility in the face of their ableist colonialist origins. Because the root of Flores and Rosa's work is also educational linguistics, we extend these arguments to education broadly, especially in the genre of intervention-based research.

All this rejecting—of competence, boundedness, typicality—may leave some readers in dismay: Labels are useful, as is delineating the scope of a particular field of inquiry. We see this not as a call to throw up our hands in postmodern despair but rather as an opportunity to expand our empirical scope and make precise our research practices, in a way that epistemological dustbins such as nonnative speaker, nonlinguistic, or disordered might have discouraged. Flores and Rosa have invited all scholars to interrogate and redefine the central questions and constructs of their field—to expand, as Charity Hudley et al. (2020) have encouraged, their notion of what linguistics is and can be.

A final point: Much of Flores and Rosa's argument on competence requires a reading of Hymes. For us, this brings up the question of whether or not abusers need to be pointed out as abusers during the citation process (Ennser-Kananen, 2019). Hymes may be a father of sociolinguistics, but we believe scholars do the field a disservice if, alongside citing his work, we do not memorialize the lost potential of the generations of women sociolinguists of whom Hymes may have deprived the field.

作为寻求在（应用）语言学理论和实践中去中心化语言学习和使用的规范模式的学者，以及作为自己的语言实践被贴上无序和非典型标签的个人，我们将弗洛雷斯和罗莎在应用语言学中能力的削弱视为一种呼吁拒绝语言学中的能力和相关的本质主义结构。

我们从弗洛雷斯和罗莎的论点开始，即语言边界（例如，是什么让“英语”被认为和“西班牙语”不同）是殖民结构。换句话说，伪装成社会事实的神话。在一个语言界限在政治上确立的世界中，“无界语言”集中了个人在多语言和多模式环境中驾驭各种话语的能力。虽然拒绝有界性通常只被认为在异国情调的上下文中相关（即，前缀为多–)，这一理论举措比一些语言学家预期的更具变革性和更广泛的适用性。例如，将边界视为社会建构的——而不是自然的分析对象——可以让语言学家停止沉迷于手势与符号等错误的二分法（Lepic & Occhino, 2018），不再担心在语言和非语言交流之间划定界限（Moriarty Harrelson，2019 年），甚至停止将语言归类为无序与否（Henner & Robinson，2021 年）。

Flores 和 Rosa 指出，即使在假定有界的语言中也不存在跨语言的一致性（参见 Kidd 等人，2018 年）。相关地，Cheng 等人。( 2022 ) 发现，在预测实验环境中一致的语言体验和行为时，“本土性”是不够的。除了与这些术语的白人至上主义起源抗争之外，这要求学者们拒绝“单语”、“母语/手语者”甚至可能是“模态”可以是有用的分析对象的概念。相反，最好将这些视为语言意识形态或语言意识形态组合（Birkeland et al., 2022）是由这些术语和相关思想出现的社会历史背景（重新）产生的。

认识到变异是常态，理想化的语言是理论上的只是第一步。关键的下一步是让所有关于语言的工作有意义地解决其与理想化语言版本的一致性问题。因为没有人使用理想化的语言，学者们也必须认识到典型的发展并不典型。语言发展是高度可变的，不符合这些非常具体和政治化的参数的人很快就会被贴上离经叛道、无序、残疾或不称职的标签。事实上，弗洛雷斯和罗莎提倡的对能力、界限和同质性的拒绝为拒绝将“无序”作为对语言实践的有效描述提供了更丰富的理论基础，因为相关的压迫结构具有相似的来源。

弗洛雷斯和罗莎从教育语言学的观点对所有语言学都至关重要。学校是国家暴力的场所，通过课程和评估计划复制和强化种族主义、性别歧视、能力歧视、阶级歧视和其他压迫性意识形态。减少种族隔离等身份边界之间摩擦的尝试往往会重现最初需要取消种族隔离的暴力。例如，在布朗诉教育委员会案摧毁了作为各种黑人社区中心的学校之后制定的废除种族隔离政策。这些学校以黑人文化和语言方式为中心，并创建了由教师、校长和主管组成的黑人中产阶级。种族隔离取消了这些学校、相关的工作和肯定的空间（霍斯福德，2010 年）。在白人学校，黑人的语言和行为方式受到严格监管。黑人学生在专业教育中的比例过高，而在天才项目中的比例不足。正如弗洛雷斯和罗莎指出的那样，在学校教育中应用的能力是这些机构植根于白人至上主义政策的功能。由于是非白人，种族化的学生被认为是不称职的（Love & Beneke，2021 年）。这就是种族化与残疾相交的地方，因为当能力是能力的副产品，并且两者都被视为基本特征时，缺乏能力就被称为“残疾”。

弗洛雷斯和罗莎提出了一个额外的论点，我们读到它是针对语言学领域的：因为支撑美国大多数（社会）语言学方法的结构与制度歧视有着共同的意识形态基础，所以投资于社会的语言学家正义和非殖民主义还必须致力于质疑诸如能力、先天性、本土性和有限性等理论假设，同时认识到诸如“典型”语言发展之类的主题根本就是一种建构。通过明确或隐含地与这些结构相关联，招募参与者研究美国英语中的句子焦点，跟踪英国手语中词汇形态的习得，或确定南德拉威人的子群都是与社会正义相关的背景。举证责任在于那些投入到这些结构的理论地位上的语言学家，以在面对其有能力的殖民主义起源时为它们的效用辩护。因为弗洛雷斯和罗莎工作的根源也是教育语言学，我们将这些论点广泛地扩展到教育，特别是在基于干预的研究类型中。

所有这些对能力、界限、典型性的拒绝可能会让一些读者感到沮丧：标签是有用的，就像描述特定研究领域的范围一样。我们认为这不是在后现代绝望中举起手来的号召，而是一个扩大我们的经验范围和精确研究实践的机会，以一种非母语、非语言或无序等认识论垃圾箱可能会阻止的方式. 弗洛雷斯和罗莎邀请所有学者审问和重新定义他们领域的核心问题和结构——扩大，正如慈善哈德利等人。（2020 年）鼓励他们对语言学是什么以及可以是什么的概念。

最后一点：弗洛雷斯和罗莎关于能力的许多论点都需要阅读海姆斯。对我们来说，这提出了在引用过程中是否需要将施虐者指出为施虐者的问题（Ennser-Kananen，2019 年）。海姆斯可能是社会语言学之父，但我们认为，如果在引用他的作品的同时，我们没有纪念海姆斯可能剥夺了该领域的几代女性社会语言学家失去的潜力，那么学者们对这个领域是有害的。