Perceived language legitimacy as a psychological judgment: a conceptual analysis of recognition, belonging, and self-worth.

This article develops perceived language legitimacy (PLL) as a theoretically refined framework for examining how languages and varieties come to be regarded as authoritative, valuable, or marginal within particular social contexts. Existing accounts of language attitudes, symbolic power, and language ideology have provided important explanations of linguistic evaluation and inequality. Less attention, however, has been given to the psychological appraisal through which speakers anticipate whether a language or variety will be accepted as a credible resource for knowledge, identity, authority, or public participation within a particular domain. PLL is conceptualized as a context-sensitive psychological judgment that complements these existing sociolinguistic and social-psychological accounts by explaining how historically established hierarchies, normative expectations, identity positions, and unequal distributions of symbolic value are interpreted by speakers. It provides a psychological link between socially organized linguistic hierarchies and speakers' expectations of recognition or devaluation as language users. The article situates PLL in relation to established concepts including language attitudes, prestige, ideology, and identity. It further considers how legitimacy judgements may influence belonging, self-worth, educational uptake, public voice, and participation in multilingual societies. By focusing on this psychological interface, the article provides an account of how linguistic inequalities are experienced by speakers and translated into language-related expectations and actions.