Language Ideology

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Language Ideology

• Arienne M. Dwyer
• University of Kansas

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Ideology

• composed of a system of ideas, and of the
  interests that drive the ideas
• An ideological observer suspects that the ideas
  are not innocent, but rather a vehicle to promote
  concealed and latent interests.
• (Marx class interests here language as
  social/political vehicle)
• features overt (open)/covert (closed)
• uses of ideology to convince

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Language ideology

• Associating language with social, political,
  moral values
• Everyone including academics has language
  ideologies (how the world should be)
• N. Tibet Nomads speak purer Tibetan
• Bishkek Go to Naryn if you want to hear real
  Kyrgyz
• some U.S. Americans English only!
• Some Uyghurs in Xinjiang Turkish is so refined
• Arienne We must document endangered languages!

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Issues in Language Ideology

• Theorists e.g. Judith Irvine
• Issues
• Language Nationalism (mostly bottom-up)
• Language Planning and Policy (mostly top-down)
• Language Rights
• Language and identity
• Readings
• Janet Chernela, Language Ideology and Womens
  Speech Talking community in Northern Amazon.
• Peter Whitley, Do Language Rights serve
  Indigenous Interests?

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Language ideology intelletual history

• historical linguistics ? philology
• typology
• Chomskyan linguistics ? universalist ?
  cognitive neuroscience
• anthropology, sociology ? relativist ? politics
  of post-colonial representation
• L.I. from linguistic anthropology
  sociolinguistics

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Linguistic nationalism

• may refer to
• a dominant culture's use of language to exercise
  its dominance (linguistic imperialism)
• the use of linguistics to support nationalistic
  ideologies (historiography and nationalism)

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Communities of practice

• Speech communities (1970s, Dell Hymes and others)
  groups who self-identify around use of one or
  more language varieties
• many are multlingual
• language ideologies provide organization (Irvine
  2006)
• Communities of practice (Eckert McConnell-Ginet
  1992, 1997)
• ascribed and constructed
• language choice indexes group membership

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Chernela

• Language choice indexes patrilineal kinship
• Linguistic exogamy - Women speak a different
  language than their husbands and children
• A child learns to suppress his mothers language
  in public
• Discourse devices in womens unauthorized use
  of language in laments
• framing (openings and closings), turn taking,
  etc.

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Language ideologies some examples

• Linguistic rights (e.g., everyone has a right to
  use his/her own language in daily life, in
  school, in work, in worship.)
• presupposes state domination
• intrinsically counterhegemonic
• entails reflexivization
• Whitley Promoting and defending the rigth to
  speak, write, be taught in, or officially express
  value in a language entails, a priori, that the
  language and the culture within which it is
  located first undergo reflexivization.
• local groups are undifferentiated

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Ideologies of change

• Good ideologies
• language planning and policies
• language standardization
• literacy and education in standard languages
• Bad kinds of social change
• Language death
• Language endangerment
• loss of language rights

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Reflexivization

• (Whitley)
• explicit consciousness of self and community
• people become aware of their shared practices,
  ideas, and forms of life
• as what they are / believe / do
• also as perceptible from a bird's eye, 'global'
  view. Once reflexivized, a languge and its
  culture appear, in important contexts of
  intercultural negotiation, to be now in a
  subjunctive mood

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Cultural displays (incl. linguistic)

• accelerated through globalization
• Hopi kachina ritual
• originally to produce rain
• now for tourists
• Sundays music at lunch
• Hungarian folk songs ? (19th c) Hungarian
  orchestras ? world famous as classical music ?
  back to folk musicians ? played for international
  tourists
• Requires consciousness of self, nation, group

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So

• Examine your own language ideologies
• E.g. Are language rights a possession?
• What do various local dialects symbolize
• for you?
• for your interviewees?
• Languages are a symbol for collective identities
  and are instruments of collective agency
• Is one language encroaching on another? Why is
  this good or bad for society?