Recent work in critical bilingual/multicultural and world language pedagogy has emphasized the importance of reconceptualizing stigmatized language varieties in education to achieve greater equity for learners. By problematizing the constructs of language, dialect, and language variety as understood by language educators and investigating the potential influence of language teachers’ preparation, we consider essential elements of teachers’ evolving critical language awareness. This issue has implications for bilingual and world language teacher education both locally and globally and must be investigated in a range of settings and contexts. Our study explored the development of critical language awareness for bilingual and world language teachers in a Master's level language teacher eduaction program. While our data came from Mandarin/English teachers, this project is relevant to all pedagogical settings in which target language(s) are present in alternative varieties. Participants were 30 pre- and in-service native Chinese-speaking teachers in the United States, spanning three stages: beginning-stage graduate students, advanced-stage students, and graduates teaching Mandarin in American schools.   Through a constructivist grounded theory approach, we conducted two semi-structured interviews with each participant. They shared varied perspectives about Chinese varieties, which demonstrated development across the three groups. Attitudes towards instruction reflected progress in the evolution of participants’ sociolinguistic awareness which nevertheless sometimes revealed inconsistencies. Implications are offered regarding teacher education curricula to support students’ self-esteem and encourage heritage language maintenance in bilingual and world language programs as well as developing critical language awareness to connect to equity in socio-political understandings and pedagogy. We will offer additional conversations with viewers going forward.