Language Ideology

In this paper, framed within linguistic historiography, we describe the ideas of Chilean conservative politician, historian and journalist Ramón Sotomayor Valdés (1830-1903) about the role of the dictionary in language standardization in Latin America. Our source is Sotomayor's admission speech read in the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the University of Chile in 1866. From this year, near a decade would pass until the publication of the first dictionary of Chilean provincialisms. We show that Sotomayor's views accurately reflect the unionist language ideology, held by intellectuals such as Andrés Bello. This language ideology is monoglossic, homogenizing and pro-Castilian, and is strongly influenced by the rationalist model of standardization. Furthermore, we point out that Sotomayor's language ideology has a very close link with his political ideas.

En el presente artículo, en el marco de la historiografía lingüística, describimos las ideas del político conservador, historiador y periodista chileno Ramón Sotomayor Valdés (18301903) acerca del papel del diccionario en la estandarización lingüística hispanoamericana. Nos basamos en su discurso de incorporación a la Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades de la Universidad de Chile, publicado en 1866, casi una década antes que el primer diccionario de provincialismos chilenos. Mostramos que la visión de Sotomayor refleja fielmente la ideología lingüística monoglósica, homogeneizante y propeninsular de los unionistas, tales como Andrés Bello, influenciada fuertemente por el modelo racionalista de la estandarización. Además, señalamos que su ideario lingüístico tiene conexión muy estrecha con su ideología política.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Jane Hill’s work on Mock Spanish (e.g., Hill, 2008) provides illuminating explanation of the appropriation of Spanish by US English speakers. She describes how speakers appropriate lexical items like cerveza (beer) to construct a positive image of themselves (e.g., as easy-going) while simultaneously indexing negative stereotypes of Spanish speakers (e.g., as lazy). Furthermore, Hill posits that Mock Spanish is a form of covert, elite racism since most instances originate among middle-class Whites, who portray themselves as “not racist” (van Dijk, 1993).

However compelling, Hill’s research has involved collecting and analyzing examples that she incidentally encountered.  Due to the limitations of this method, she has called for other approaches to answer questions like how the frequency of Mock Spanish has changed over time (Hill, 1995). We attempt to answer this call by incorporating corpus linguistics into the study of mock language (Vessey, 2014).

Our study uses the 450 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), containing a stratified sample of texts representing different years and genres (Davies, 2010). Similar numbers of texts are taken from each year between 1990 and 2012 and from several contexts: television and radio, fiction, newspapers, magazines, and academic publications. COCA, therefore, provides an appropriate dataset to study Mock Spanish’s frequency in several domains of elite discourse and its changes over the past two decades.

In our presentation, we describe our methodology which combines computational and manual techniques to locate and examine Mock Spanish tokens. Our methods allow us to describe a larger, more comprehensive lexicon of available Mock Spanish tokens than previously reported. We also discuss the distribution of Mock Spanish across genres and over time, explaining tendencies and changes with reference to ideological conflicts in the US (e.g., over Latin American immigration). Finally, we discuss the limitations of a corpus-based investigation of Mock Spanish.

Deslenguadas. (We are de-tongued.) Somos los del español deficiente. (We are those with deficient Spanish.) We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestizaje (your linguistic miscegenation), the subject of your burla (the subject of your derision). Because we speak with tongues of fire, we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally, and linguistically somos huérfanos (we are orphans)—we speak an orphan tongue. (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 58)

English holds an unparalleled place in the world as a lingua franca; no language before has been spoken by so many people. Research has found that students believe learning English is vital to their job prospects (Saraceni, 2010, p.116; Ustinova, 2011, p.72 ) and this study aimed to test whether a knowledge of English rewarded its speakers with higher wages in a non-English speaking country; Spain. Until now, there had been a lack of empirical research on the role of English for the individual in a first world country where English was not the first language; previous research had focused on the influence of English on the economy, and more specifically the relationship between proficiency as a whole and GDP, or the knowledge of English of immigrants to America and their resulting wage levels. Consequently, this study attempted to test whether English as a foreign language in Spain resulted in a higher wage for individuals.

In order to conduct the research, 398 adverts from the Spanish job site www.infojobs.net were collected; 199 were adverts that did not specifically ask for a language to be spoken and the other half of the sample specifically stated that English needed to be spoken and the wage or salary range was taken from the adverts. The research was conducted by selecting the new jobs tab. The same research method was used in a study by Marchal and Rieucau (2005) because language was not covered in their original study and it can test the linguistic imperialist hypothesis (Phillipson, 1992; Kachru, 1986) empirically. The Spanish also addressed a limitation of other studies which had used developing countries to assess the impact of English (Ramaswami et al., 2012) and in a country, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) (2006), with very low education inequality, compared to studies conducted in America (Saiz, 2002; Levitt, 2014).

The study found little suggestion that English holds a disproportionate place in Spain. The adverts which did not require English or any other language yielded an average wage of €21,193.62 at 100% and €19,586.86 at 80% compared to €20,322.18 for 100% and €19,283.65 for 80% of the sample for jobs that require English. The hypothesis that different proficiencies were rewarded with different salaries (Tupas, 2008) showed some sign of being true. The results show that the fluent proficiency category paid more than the high proficiency category, which in turn paid more than the medium proficiency category.
Accordingly, using the Common European Framework of Reference for Language (CEFR), this equates to the difference between a C1, B2 and B1 (Intermediate) qualification being €2,000 a year in salary per proficiency level. This result is challenged by the highest proficiency level, bilingual, which was the most poorly paid of all the proficiencies in the data set. The adverts which asked for a third language in addition to Spanish and English dropped the average also to €18,229.21 from €20,860.62. The same trend was true for those who spoke French, where the mean was €17,010.53. However, for those who speak German, the average was highest of all at €21,365.44.

In this article I comment on the fact that the Internet and social media are often depicted as orthographically unregulated spaces in public and political discourses on young peoples’ use of social media. I point out that adolescent Facebook users in fact do orient towards different norms of language use by means of self- and other-corrections. I argue that corrections of language use are about more than mere orientation toward linguistic correctness and I suggest that correction practices on Facebook provide information about social relations among the adolescents I study. By carrying out sequential analysis of Facebook interactions I demonstrate how the adolescents negotiate each other’s (linguistic) behavior and what norms are relevant in different situations.

This paper deals with Bourdieu’s relations of power (linguistic market) and Fanon’s Zone of Being and non-Being. The article is based on recent ethnographic sociolinguistic research in Andalusia, south of Spain. In this paper, I explore ways in which the decapitalisation of Andalusian speakers is part of a global hierarchisation of inferiorization. In this way, the language is a marker. A group’s devalued variety of language in the linguistic market is explained as ideology of domination with historical basis. Therefore, it is not a product of features of the no-legitimate language.

Newcomers to Canada whose names index identities other than “white” and “English” face pressure to alter their names to facilitate integration. Some immigrants oppose the forces of conformity and refuse to assimilate their names. In interviews, they explain this stance using discourses of agency centring on a belief in true names, a moral obligation to get names right, and a need for a strong self. Focusing on ideologies of identity and language in their meta-agentive discourses, I argue that the act of immigrants keeping their ethnic names is a political move to redistribute responsibility for the integration of newcomers into the host society.

In this paper, presented at the XLVI International Congress of the Societa' Italiana di Linguistica (Siena, 27-29 September 2012), I try to summarize my ongoing research on the endangered multilingualism practices in Lower Fungom, a linguistically highly diverse micro-area located at the northern edges of the Cameroonian Grassfields. Unlike most of the past and current research on Africa's "complicated" multilingualism, my focus is non-urban settings (only few scholars, among whom Bruce Connell and Friederike Luepke, are doing similar research). This orientation allows me to encounter traditional (i.e. most likely pre-colonial) sociocultural dynamics involving the development of multilingual competences. In particular, I stress that the apparent, yet so far neglected, connection existing between the individual's tendency towards maximization of the number of potential networks of solidarity (an ethnographic fact) and the use of language as the most powerful tool for symbolizing affiliation in one or the other network, could in fact be seen as being rooted in beliefs of magic. I also mention the possibility that data from Lower Fungom and similar contexts would stimulate re-consideration of the essentialist-indexical dichotomy in language ideology studies (though this part has not been developed in this talk).

Unlike most existing scholarship, which highlights the highly emotional, nearly irrational component of media debates surrounding the Afrikaans language, this article argues that rationalisation is present in even the most heated language ideological scenarios, taking several conflicting guises that are particular in nature. To this end, the article investigates a small-scale, self-contained discussion in the ‘new media’ that can be seen as a manifestation of enduring and deeply rooted beliefs about the role of Afrikaans in today’s South Africa.

The amount of new semantic content circulated in a society is limited by implicit norms and explicit rules. Belonging to a community means knowing, mastering, and even interiorizing such restrictions. Some of them are imposed by economy, as in the case of copyright, some by moral, as with pornography, and some for political reasons. In times of international tension such restrictions are tightened, giving rise to state ideologies and rhetorics of taciturnity. The essay explores those that came about in Italy, German, and Japan during World War II but also those that were circulated in their democratic opposers, USA and UK. The study seeks to show the relevance of a semiotic analysis of this corpus of propaganda materials not only for the sake of historical knowledge but also so as to cast new light on urgent present-day issues concerning both private and public conversation.

Reseña de Elvira Narvaja de Arnoux y Susana Nothstein (eds.)(2013) "Temas de glotopolítica. Integración regional sudamericana y panhispanismo". Buenos Aires: Biblos, 386 páginas, ISBN 9789876912570. Publicada en Circula: revue d´idéologies linguistiques, publicación de la Universidad de Sherbrooke, Canadá.

I explore the ways in which language ideologies are transformed when they are transplanted to diasporic settings as a result of migration. I examine the labelling of Cypriot Greek features as slang by young British-born speakers of Greek Cypriot heritage. Drawing on the analysis of data collected in a Greek complementary school in London, I suggest that slang is applied to Cypriot Greek through a process of re-enregisterment that redefines the contrast it forms with Standard Greek in the model of the slang vs posh English binary, which is local to the London context and is constructed along the lines of the ideological schemata of properness and correctness that also define the opposition between Cypriot Greek and Standard Greek in Cyprus. I propose that the policy and practice of teaching Greek in the school is a key enabler in this process as it constructs Standard Greek as a language that can and must be written and Cypriot Greek as a language that can only be spoken but never written. This allows complementary school pupils to draw links with institutional discourses they are exposed to in mainstream education about the inappropriateness of including elements labelled as slang in their writing.

Teaching English Language Variation in the Global Classroom offers researchers and teachers methods for instructing students on the diversity of the English language on a global scale. A complement to Devereaux and Palmer's Teaching Language Variation in the Classroom, this collection provides real-world, classroom-tested strategies for teaching English language variation in a variety of contexts and countries, and with a variety of language learners. Each chapter balances theory with discussions of curriculum and lesson planning to address how to effectively teach in global classrooms with approaches based on English language variation. With lessons and examples from five continents, the volume covers recent debates on many pedagogical topics, including standardization, stereotyping, code-switching, translanguaging, translation, identity, ideology, empathy, and post-colonial and critical theoretical approaches. The array of pedagogical strategies, accessible linguistic research, clear methods, and resources provided makes it an essential volume for pre-service and in-service teachers, graduate students, and scholars in courses on TESOL, EFL, World/Global Englishes, English as a Medium of Instruction, and Applied Linguistics.

The contributors to this volume provide a critical examination of the notion of bilingualism as it has developed in linguistics and of its use in discourses of social regulation in state and civil society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They attempt to move the field away from a "common sense," but in fact highly ideologized, view of bilingualism as the co-existence of two linguistic systems, and to develop a critical perspective which approaches "bilingualism" as a wide variety of sets of sociolinguistic practices connected to the construction of social difference and of social inequality under specific historical conditions.

Teacher education has redoubled efforts to prepare a predominantly monolingual teaching force for linguistic diversity in U.S. schools. Some jurisdictions are requiring specific teacher preparation, such as mandated Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) endorsement in Massachusetts, the context of this study. Previous research has explored the intersections of language ideologies and practice through such coursework. However, few studies have accounted for the underlying monolingual ideologies that inform U.S education. Therefore, this study employs a mixed methods approach to analyze language ideologies among 127 preservice and beginning teachers engaged in SEI methods coursework. Drawing on written reflections, survey data, and reported practices, this study offers a framework for exploring teacher language ideologies. This framework highlights a trajectory of lived ontologies, pedagogical orientations, and key contextual “filters” that may distort language ideologies in practice. The framework is operationalized through an analysis of monolingual ideologies across educational policy, practice, and teacher preparation.

If categories of race, ethnicity, and language are social constructs, how can we represent them ethnographically without reifying them? Taking this question as its starting point, this methods seminar analyzes strategies for writing race, ethnicity, and language in ethnography. In that they are simultaneously ubiquitous features of everyday life yet often difficult to articulate with precision, race, ethnicity, and language are highly elusive phenomena. We will read a range of ethnographies that seek to overcome this dilemma by neither taking race, ethnicity, and language for granted as naturally occurring phenomena nor avoiding the complex ways in which they shape interactions, institutions, and identities. In addition to reading various ethnographies, students will conduct their own ethnographic research to test out the authors' contrasting approaches to data collection, analysis, and representation. The goal is for students to develop a rich ethnographic toolkit that will allow them to effectively represent the (re)production and (trans)formation of racial, ethnic, and linguistic phenomena. Guidelines and Requirements 1. Discussion facilitations Each week a group of students will be designated as the discussion facilitators; each student will facilitate discussion during two weeks throughout the quarter. For the weeks in which you sign up to facilitate discussion, you are expected to collaborate with your fellow discussion facilitators to develop a set of discussion questions and a creative way in which to guide the discussion. Your group will prepare a handout with your reflections on the reading(s) and your discussion questions. This handout should be approximately 1-2 single-spaced pages; make enough copies to distribute to everyone in the class on the day of your facilitation. Feel free to bring in any audiovisual media to supplement your handout. There is no possible way that you could get to all of the issues covered in the reading, so focus on whatever ideas interest you most.

One of the factors in monolingual interactions is language ideology, the underlying beliefs people have about communication. This is also true in interpreter-mediated interactions. In this paper, I begin to unpack the impact not only of ideologies held by recipients of interpreted presentations, but also of interpreters themselves. After recognizing four domains of interpreted utterances that affect hearing listeners' perceptions of the identity of Deaf professionals, the next questions are what drives interpreters' discursive choices and how do their language ideologies contribute to their spoken output.

In this article I investigate Navajo poet Laura Tohe’s uses of metapragmatic terms in three literary works found in her book No Parole Today. Tohe’s book focuses on the boarding school experience and is especially concerned with issues of language use. I argue that Tohe uses metadiscourses that both dramatize language use but also create affectively potent relations
between speakers and the languages they use. These metadiscourses are implicit metadiscourses. Rather than explicitly stating that Navajo should be the language of social intimacy for Navajos, Tohe dramatizes such relationships. Such implicit metadiscourses gain added import when understood within the larger social fields of the Navajo Nation and current ideologies about the Navajo language.

This article deals with the symbolic and material formation of an authenticated register of Övdalsk – a Scandinavian local language – unfolding in a situated engagement with grammatical artefacts. Seeking to refine the often underspecified category of the indexically ‘pre-shift,’ ‘traditional,’ ‘old’ or, in some other way, temporally authenticated register, it intercalates an analysis of linguistic exchanges with histories of production of authoritative discourse. Through a stepwise analysis of the production of metapragmatic discourse, it explores the indexically presupposing and entailing relationship between artefactual objectivation and novel registers of language. Thus examining the enregistering interpretation of genred regimentations of language-as-form, it argues that such focus is apt for creating a reflexive and less essentializing understanding of linguistic authenticity.

Keywords: authenticity; indexicality; enregisterment; metapragmatics; descriptivism; engagement

This paper explores the prescriptivist and descriptivist language ideologies present in the documentation for teaching the new GCSE and A level English Language courses (introduced in 2016 and 2015 respectively). Investigation of this corpus of government and exam board materials also suggests a very strong emphasis on assessment, which in combination with the conflicted language ideological messages, potentially affects teachers' understanding of the notion of Standard English.

Claiming to rely on “science,” many well-intentioned “experts” offer advice on how to “close
the gap”—word gap, language gap, achievement gap—between disadvantaged and
advantaged children. Based on both research and personal experience, this advice promises
magic solutions to apparently complex and intractable problems by coaching disadvantaged
parents in how best to speak to their young children. One significant shortcoming, however,
is that the research is often circular, mistaking correlation and causation, and it is based on
limited populations—what Henrich et al. 2010 termed WEIRD populations of Western,
Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic people, often majority undergraduate college
students in North America. The unseen assumptions about what is “natural” or “optimal” may
be evident when cross-cultural evidence is brought to contrast with the assumed proper way
to socialize children into language—ways familiar to white, middle-class, professional North
American practitioners. This article reveals three of the dominant ideologies governing the
“gaps” discourse: parochial understandings of language, childhood, and learning. Ultimately,
I argue that accepting diverse aspects of all these concepts can give rise to flourishing human
beings.

The question for my project is: In an environment of mandatory proverb instruction for youth, what do youth express as significant by means of these same proverbs? I will explore how Kazakh-speaking college students use Kazakh proverbs to narrativize “community”. I will do this be evaluating their knowledge and use of Kazakh proverbs addressing such issues as nationalism/patriotism, unity, family, and ethnic identity.

This article examines the language use and ideologies of participants in a 2015 study of Gaelic-medium educated adults, a key demographic for language maintenance. The author investigated outcomes of Gaelic-medium education (GME) among a sample of 130 adults who started in GME during the first years of its availability in Scotland, in the late 1980s and 1990s. This project drew on both quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the degree to which past GME students use Gaelic, along with the attitudinal and ideological correlates which may underlie this usage. An online questionnaire focusing on language use elicited 112 responses between 2011 and 2013. These were analysed statistically to examine the relationships between social and linguistic variables. Additionally, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 46 informants to examine these issues in greater detail. Crucially, the majority of participants' day-today Gaelic language use was limited, although notable exceptions to this were found among speakers who were substantially socialised in the language during childhood, and those who work in Gaelic-oriented professions. Specifically, this paper addresses the extent to which participants use Gaelic in the work, home and community environments, and examines one set of language ideologies that appears to underlie these language practices. The discussion draws on both statistical and qualitative data to shed further light on the overall sociolinguistic picture which emerged from the study.

“Keleti Újság” [‘Eastern Newspaper’] was a Hungarian daily newspaper published in Cluj-Napoca between 1918 and 1944, and is considered one of the most important periodicals of the period between the two World Wars. Covering a large range of topics, it also includes articles on the Hungarian language, as in 1936 Jenő Dsida, one of the most important poets of the period started a column (or a ‘movement’, as they called it) dedicated to the cultivation of the Hungarian language in Romania, entitled Anyanyelvünkért (‘For the protection of our mother tongue’). My paper discusses the linguistic ideologies behind the articles published in the column as well as the way in which the ethno-linguistic vitality of the Hungarian language as a minority language in Romania is outlined in these texts, together with the impact it had on the readership of the newspaper as very many scholars and everyday readers got involved in the movement for the protection of the language. I also try to identify the attitudes and ideologies regarding the Hungarian language as well as the concept of multi- and plurilingualism.