Language Ideologies (Anthropology)

Introduction
Language ideologies are conceptualizations about languages, speakers, and discursive practices. Like other kinds of ideologies, language ideologies are pervaded with political and moral interests and are shaped in a cultural setting. To study language ideologies, then, is to explore the nexus of language, culture, and politics. It is to examine how people construe language’s role in a social and cultural world, and how their construals are socially positioned. Those construals include the ways people conceive of language itself, as well as what they understand by the particular languages and ways of speaking that are within their purview. Language ideologies are inherently plural: because they are positioned, there is always another position—another perspective from which the world of discursive practice is differently viewed. Their positioning makes language ideologies always partial, in that they can never encompass all possible views—but also partial in that they are at play in the sphere of interested human social action. Authors writing on this topic have variously called it “linguistic ideology,” “language ideology,” or “ideology of language.” The slight differences of terminology have not signaled major differences in conception. Although the anthropological approach to language ideology is distinctive, it overlaps with research in other disciplines. Approaches rooted in disciplinary linguistics, such as Critical Discourse Analysis, are anthropology’s close kin, while political and social theorists writing on “ideology” are of obvious relevance. Because the concept of language ideology is so fertile, it connects to more disciplines and issues than can be reviewed here. However, those interdisciplinary links also entail some tensions, for example, concerning whether linguistic form or social issues take priority as subject matter, or whether analysis should focus more on texts or more on practices, or what is included in “language” itself. Works by anthropologists of differing intellectual commitments show traces of some similar debates, but within a general consensus on the value of joining ethnographic and linguistic research.
Concept History
Language ideology is a relatively recent field of study. It emerged from the Ethnography of Speaking school of the 1960s and 1970s, which had emphasized cultural conceptions of language as these were manifest in culturally distinctive patterns of speaking. By the 1980s, several scholars in this school had turned toward a focus on language’s relation to power and political economy (seeFriedrich 1989, Gal 1989, Irvine 1989). At the same time, there was a growing interest in seeing how politics and social action might be embedded in specifics of language structure. This second concern was being developed especially by Silverstein, who took linguistic form as his starting point and looked toward the social activity and cultural ideas embedded in it; scholars in the ethnography of speaking school had tended to work in the other direction, starting from social formations. Silverstein 1979 offered an influential formulation of “linguistic ideologies” as “any sets of beliefs about language articulated by the users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use.” Taken up and elaborated by other linguistic anthropologists in the 1980s and 1990s, “language ideology” was given a more sociocultural emphasis by Irvine 1989, which defined it as “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests.” Along similar lines, Gal 1989 noted that language ideologies are not only explicit, but also include more tacit assumptions about the nature of language and its use. Further developing the concept to make it more consistent with Marxist approaches to “ideology,” Gal envisioned language ideologies as differentiated between groups (of speakers) with different positions in a political economy. Meanwhile, from linguistics, an influential edited collection, Joseph and Taylor 1990, took up the question of what ideological bases underlay the “science of language” itself.Woolard and Schieffelin 1994 shows how large this field had already grown by the mid-1990s. Its history was more extensively reviewed by Woolard 1998. See also the review from a few years later,Kroskrity 2004. Keane 2007 proposes “semiotic ideology” as a related, but broader, concept.
Friedrich, Paul. 1989. Language, ideology, and political economy. American Anthropologist91:295–312.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1989.91.2.02a00010Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Distinguishes several valuable senses of “ideology,” such as a “notional” sense and a more “pragmatic” sense. Even if ideology is seen as “the more intellectual constituent of culture,” it is useful in considering those aspects of culture having to do with political economy, such as the division of labor.
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Gal, Susan. 1989. Language and political economy. Annual Review of Anthropology 18:345–367.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.18.100189.002021Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A review article that connects anthropological approaches to its topic with Marxist work on ideology, especially in terms of the positioning of social groups within a social system.
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Irvine, Judith T. 1989. When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy. American Ethnologist 16:248–267.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.1989.16.2.02a00040Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This paper outlines a range of ways in which language structures and uses are involved with a political economy. It ends with comments about language ideology, defined in terms that emphasize sociocultural aspects.
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Joseph, John, and Talbot J. Taylor, eds. 1990. Ideologies of language. New York: Routledge.
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Studies in this collection explore the ideologies of scholars working in the “science of language,” from the 17th century to the present, in various countries and intellectual traditions.
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Keane, E. Webb. 2007. Christian moderns: Freedom and fetish in the mission encounter. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Keane argues for situating language ideology within a “semiotic ideology” that would include other semiotic modalities, as well as conceptions of materiality. A century of Dutch Calvinist missionary efforts in Indonesia offers the case materials for the discussion.
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Kroskrity, Paul. 2004. Language ideology. In Companion to linguistic anthropology. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, 496–517. Oxford: Blackwell.
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This is a review article that identifies major strands of research on language ideology to date. The article overlaps with Kroskrity’s introduction to the collection he edited in 2000 (see Kroskrity 2000, cited under Foundational Collections).
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Silverstein, Michael. 1979. Language structure and linguistic ideology. In The elements: A parasession on linguistic units and levels. Edited by Paul Clyne, William F. Hanks, and Carol L. Hofbauer. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
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The first formulation of “linguistic ideology.” The paper then develops Silverstein’s semiotic reading of Whorf, along with some extended examples.
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Woolard, Kathryn. 1998. Language ideology as a field of inquiry. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 3–49. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A crucial introduction to the field. Surveys the history of research to date, and identifies important differences in conceptions of “ideology” in social theory insofar as these show up as different approaches in language ideology research.
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Woolard, Kathryn, and Bambi Schieffelin. 1994. Language ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology 23:55–82.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.23.100194.000415Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An early review of research in this field, it served to put this then-new field on the intellectual map. Later largely superseded by Woolard 1998.
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Foundational Collections
Work in this field has appeared primarily in essay form, although monographs have recently begun to appear as well. Following on the works mentioned in Concept History, the turn of the 21st century saw the publication of several important collections that not only illustrated the kinds of analyses that could be done, but also offered an opportunity for focused debate. Seminal volumes featuring mainly US-based linguistic anthropologists include Schieffelin, et al. 1998; Kroskrity 2000; and Gal and Woolard 2001. These volumes were so important to developments in the field that several of the essays contained in them will be mentioned separately, in other sections of this bibliography. At the same time as these US-based volumes emerged, enthusiasm about the analysis of language ideology as an approach to understanding relations among language, power, and social process spread to continental Europe. Two collections, Blommaert 1999 and Verschueren 1999, showcase the range of this work. In Blommaert’s and Verschueren’s collections, contributors came from both sides of the Atlantic: American research, stemming mainly from anthropology, came together with European work originating mainly in “pragmatics,” a branch of disciplinary linguistics concerned with functional (cognitive, cultural, and social) dimensions of language. More recent collections are more narrowly focused, either on a particular topic, such as Jaworski, et al. 2004, or on a geographical region.
Blommaert, Jan, ed. 1999. Language ideological debates. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Articles in this collection concern explicit, public debates over language issues seen as having political implications.
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Gal, Susan, and Kathryn Woolard, eds. 2001. Languages and publics: The making of authority. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome.
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The papers in this collection are quite varied but all can be considered under the rubric of “publics” and how language ideologies contribute to their constitution.
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Jaworski, Adam, Nikolas Coupland, and Dariusz Galasinski, eds. 2004. Metalanguage: Social and ideological perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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The papers in this collection discuss metalanguage—talk about talk—in a range of contexts. Metalanguage is a primary source of information and evidence about language ideologies, although not all the papers take the step of firmly relating their data to discussions of language ideologies.
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Kroskrity, Paul, ed. 2000. Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
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An extremely important collection, with essays that have set the agenda for discussion of language ideologies in linguistic anthropology and other fields. Kroskrity’s introduction lays out pertinent themes and debates.
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Schieffelin, Bambi, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, eds. 1998. Language ideologies: Practice and theory. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A foundational collection laying out the important themes and debates in the study of language ideology. Woolard’s excellent introduction includes a review of the history of the field and its relationship to concepts of “ideology” in social theory.
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Verschueren, Jef, ed. 1999. Selected papers of the 6th International Pragmatics Conference. Vol. 1, Language and ideology. Antwerp, Belgium: International Pragmatics Association.
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This large volume presents selected papers from the Sixth International Pragmatics Conference, which featured “language and ideology” as the conference theme.
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Area-Focused Collections
Case studies of language ideologies in ethnographic context began to appear simultaneously with the early theoretical work on the concept. These initial studies were in article form and might be more concerned to make a theoretical point than to describe a particular world region. Rumsey 1990, for example, uses the author’s Australian case as a way to discuss ideologies of the relationship between words and action. It continues to be the case that a great deal of publication on language ideologies is in the form of essays rather than monographs. There are now several edited volumes that collect essays focused on the language ideologies in some world region. Recent examples include Kroskrity and Field 2009 on Native North America, Makihara and Schieffelin 2007 on the Pacific, and Okamoto and Shibamoto Smith 2004 on Japan.
Kroskrity, Paul, and Margaret Field, eds. 2009. Native American language ideologies: Beliefs, practices, and struggles in Indian country. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press.
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This volume collects studies of language ideologies in native North-American communities, with an emphasis on ideological dimensions of efforts to retain or revitalize endangered languages, community identity, and cultural autonomy.
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Makihara, Miki, and Bambi Schieffelin, eds. 2007. Consequences of contact: Language ideologies and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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In a range of Pacific settings, from New Guinea to Melanesia to Polynesia, these studies consider language contact between local and colonizer populations. Contributors discuss the role of language ideologies in explaining the varied outcomes of these contacts.
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Okamoto, Shigeko, and Janet Shibamoto Smith, eds. 2004. Japanese language, gender, and ideology: Cultural models and real people. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Papers in this collection focus on gender relations in Japan as revealed in linguistic practice, stereotypes, and texts. Only some of the contributors link their analyses to language ideology per se—as opposed to cultural ideologies of gender, for example—but all the contributors offer materials relevant to a broad consideration of language ideologies in Japan.
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Rumsey, Alan. 1990. Wording, meaning, and linguistic ideology. American Anthropologist92:346–361.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1990.92.2.02a00060Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article presents evidence for a linguistic ideology from aboriginal Australia (Ungarinyin), an ideology that sees language as thoroughly pragmatic—that does not distinguish words themselves from action. Rumsey links this ideology with formal linguistic patterns: Ungarinyin, he argues, does not distinguish direct from indirect discourse.
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Journals
Several peer-reviewed journals now regularly publish work on this topic: the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language in Society, Language and Communication, the Journal of Sociolinguistics, and Pragmatics. Less often, but occasionally, articles touching on language ideology can be found inAnthropological Linguistics. From time to time, articles on this topic also appear in journals on general anthropology or sociocultural anthropology. Examples include American Anthropologist andAmerican Ethnologist.
American Anthropologist.
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The flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, published quarterly. Peer-reviewed, it publishes articles, book and film reviews, obituaries, and commentary. Occasionally an issue has a thematic focus. Topical coverage includes linguistic anthropology as one of the discipline’s traditional “four fields.” A few articles have concerned language ideology.
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American Ethnologist.
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The journal of the American Ethnological Society, a unit of the American Anthropological Association. It is peer reviewed. Appearing quarterly, it publishes articles and book reviews. Its subject matter concerns ethnology in the broadest sense, linking ethnographic specificity with theoretical issues. Occasionally articles have concerned language ideology in some ethnographic setting.
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Anthropological Linguistics.
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This peer-reviewed journal, published quarterly, has a longtime connection with the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University. Articles and book reviews are published. Although articles on indigenous languages of the Americas predominate, articles on other languages appear as well. The emphasis is on linguistic study in cultural context; discussion of language ideology as such is only occasional.
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Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.
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This peer-reviewed journal is a biannual publication of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, a unit of the American Anthropological Association. It publishes articles and book reviews, and occasional thematic issues. Some especially important essays on language ideology have appeared in it.
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Journal of Sociolinguistics.
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This international, peer-reviewed journal is published five times yearly. It publishes articles, research notes, and book reviews. All contributions concern topics that are both linguistic and social, and the journal’s policy interprets “sociolinguistics” in the broadest sense, including ethnographic approaches, for example. Articles focusing on language ideology, or touching on it, appear relatively often.
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Language and Communication.
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This is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal appearing four times per year and publishes contributions from all fields relevant to the study of verbal and nonverbal communication. Thematically focused issues occur approximately annually. Articles focusing on, or touching on, language ideology appear relatively often.
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Language in Society.
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This international peer-reviewed journal appears five times a year. It publishes articles and book reviews, and it is concerned with all aspects of speech and language that pertain to social life. Articles focusing on, or touching on, language ideology appear relatively often.
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Pragmatics.
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This peer-reviewed journal, published quarterly, is produced by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), based in Belgium. Issues include articles and, as of 2010, book reviews. Focus and scope are wide-ranging in their concern with language as used in social contexts; articles on some aspect of language ideology appear relatively often.
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“Ideology” in Social Theory
Any discussion of language ideology must take into account the history of thinking about “ideology” and the conceptual baggage the term can carry. A huge literature exists on the concept of ideology, its history, and related issues. Marxist views are prominent (see Negative and Positive Conceptions), but they are not the only ones. As noted in Williams 1977, the concept of ideology did not originate in Marxism and is not confined to it. Actually, the term idéologie was introduced in the late 18th century by Destutt de Tracy as the science of ideas—to him a branch of zoology, since he saw ideas as based in sensation (Destutt de Tracy 1827). For reviews of the history of the concept, Eagleton 2007is one of the most detailed, while Freeden 2007 is the most interdisciplinary. Shorter reviews inWoolard 1998 and Blommaert 2005, while brief, usefully link the history of “ideology” in social theory to studies of language.
Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511610295Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A wide-ranging discussion of discourse and analytical approaches to it, with a chapter on ideology.
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Destutt de Tracy, Antoine. 1827. Élémens d’idéologie. 1: Idéologie proprement dit. Paris: Lévi.
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This work coined the term idéologie (“ideology”) as the science of ideas. Destutt’s followers, known as the idéologues, began their work just after the 1789 French Revolution; the label was given a derogatory sense by Napoleon Bonaparte. First published in 1801.
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Eagleton, Terry. 2007. Ideology: An introduction. New York: Verso.
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An especially thorough and important discussion of the concept of “ideology” in social theory, including a lengthy review of its history. But this review does not include work on language ideology, the bulk of which emerged since the book was written. The second edition is identical except for a brief additional introduction. First published in 1990.
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Freeden, Michael, ed. 2007. The meaning of ideology: Cross-disciplinary perspectives. New York: Routledge.
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This collection contains, in addition to Freeden’s own paper, contributions from scholars representing a range of other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.
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Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Williams develops strong arguments for the relevance of language and literature for Marxism. A chapter focuses on ideology.
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Woolard, Kathryn. 1998. Language ideology as a field of inquiry. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 3–49. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Reviews the history of the concept of ideology in social theory, as background to research in language ideology.
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Negative and Positive Conceptions
Marxist theorists have been prominent among those who cite “ideology” when considering how culture and ideas might be connected with social formations. This line of theoretical discussion began with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. First published in 1846, Marx and Engels 1989 argued that “the real ground of history” lay in material social processes, so any theorist who located history’s “primary causes” in ideas was making a fundamental mistake. This notion of ideology as deceptive—as “false consciousness,” leading people to misunderstand their own social situation—has been long-lasting, although an ideology cannot be wholly false and still be effective. An ideology must make some sense of people’s experience, if they are to believe it at all. The possibility, however, that ideology serves only the interests of a dominant class, as the wool they pull over everyone else’s eyes (perhaps even their own), has contributed to debates in language ideology too. Accompanying the notion of ideology as false consciousness is the idea that ideology belongs to others, never to oneself or to the people with whom one identifies. Many social scientists have distinguished “ideology”—the social analyses of others, such as communists or religious fundamentalists—from “science,” their own line of analysis. Yet, this distinction supposes that one has a corner on the truth, that one’s own social position affords a “God’s eye-view,” or is somehow neutral, permitting a view from nowhere. Some writers (e.g., Michel Foucault; see Foucault 1980) conclude that one should avoid the concept of ideology if one lays no such claim to absolute truth. Most of the linguistic anthropologists who work on language ideology would probably agree that no position is neutral, including their own. Nevertheless, it is easier to see ideologies across a social boundary than in oneself. These rather negative conceptions of “ideology” are not the whole picture. Other perspectives on the concept are more positive, suggesting that ideologies are what provide people with a map of the social world, and with interpretive principles that make sense of their experience and their own acts in that world (see, e.g., Geertz 1978; compare Mannheim 1936, Gramsci 1971). Ideologies can also be seen (Althusser 1971) as producing the lived relations that constitute human roles and experience in society. They offer subject positions—bases for social action. Malešević 2002 takes up the possibility that a theory of ideology could be agency centered. Žižek 1994 collects essays, classic and more recent, representing a range of views.
Althusser, Louis. 1971. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In Lenin and philosophy and other essays. By Louis Althusser, 85–126. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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Ideology as lived experience, offering subject positions and bases for social action. Discusses ideology as embedded in institutions, and as the means by which the state, or other social power, reproduces itself. The ruling power thus relies not only on armed force, but also on “ideological state apparatuses.”
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Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon.
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Although Foucault abjures the concept of “ideology” in this work, largely because equating it with a “false consciousness” that assumes access to absolute truth, his arguments about knowledge and power remain relevant.
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Geertz, Clifford. 1978. Ideology as a cultural system. In The interpretation of cultures. By Clifford Geertz, 193–233. New York: Basic Books.
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A classic essay discussing ideologies as “maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience.” With this culturalist view of ideology as a cultural system of representations and map for social action, Geertz proposes to make “ideology” a useful analytical concept, not a mere pejorative. Originally published in 1964.
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Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers.
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Posthumous publication from Gramsci’s imprisonment under the fascists. Contains his conception of “hegemony,” among other ideological topics.
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Siniša Malešević. 2002. Rehabilitating ideology after poststructuralism. In Ideology after poststructuralism. 87–110. London: Pluto Press for the Social Science Research Council.
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Counters those who, like Foucault, reject the concept of ideology in favor of “discourse,” arguing that the Foucauldian concept of discourse is little different from “ideology.” Proposes an agency-centered theory of ideology.
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Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and utopia: An introduction to the sociology of knowledge. London: International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method.
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A nonevaluative approach to ideology, placing it in a general sociology of knowledge: all systems of thought are socially situated.
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Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1989. The German ideology. Edited by C. J. Arthur. New York: International.
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The classic work in which Marx and Engels decried a then-current school of German social thought for emphasizing religion and philosophy as the driving force in society. Originally published in 1846.
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Žižek, Slavoj, ed. 1994. Mapping ideology. New York: Verso.
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A collection of articles on ideology, mostly but not all Marxist. Classic papers, such as Althusser 1971 and contributions by Adorno, Lacan, and Jameson are included.
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Critical Discourse Analysis
Originating in Britain in the 1970s, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) began as a program putting linguistic analysis in the service of a leftist social critique. The linguistic analysis itself developed out of a “systemic-functional” linguistics associated with the work of Michael Halliday, joined with a British school of Cultural Studies. The focus of CDA is on tracing political and economic dominance, power, and control—especially power that is reproduced in large-scale institutions—as manifest in language. Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak are prominent figures in this field; see Fairclough 1989 and Wodak and Meyer 2002 for representative work. Many studies analyze printed texts such as advertising copy, newspaper articles, and policy documents; Kress and Hodge 1979 is an early example. Others analyze political rhetoric. The research is conceived as oriented toward social activism. CDA is less about studying ideology of language than about locating—and unmasking—(political) ideology in language. Moreover, the almost exclusive concern with European and European-derived social settings, with ideologies derived from the state and from large-scale institutions, and the focus mainly on text rather than on real-time practice, further distinguish CDA’s approach from anthropological work. Although CDA’s topics clearly overlap with those of anthropological research on language ideology, Jan Blommaert (see Blommaert 2001) and his associates have criticized CDA on both theoretical and ethnographic grounds.
Blommaert, Jan. 2001. Context is/as critique. Critique of Anthropology 21.1: 13–32.
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Argues that CDA takes for granted what “power” is, equating it with particular kinds of First World capitalist institutions. Thus one kind of context is assumed, and only one; Blommaert points out other important contexts. CDA’s arguments tend to be circular, Blommaert suggests, collapsing the difference between semantics and pragmatics, and reading function directly off of text.
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Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and power. London: Longman.
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The landmark publication establishing CDA as a program of analysis. Contains many interesting examples, unmasking the effects of institutional power in “ordinary” texts.
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Kress, Gunther, and Robert A. Hodge. 1979. Language as ideology. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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An early work in CDA arguing that language is the site in which ideology is produced and reproduced. Focuses on text analysis.
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Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer, eds. 2002. Methods of critical discourse analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
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Contributors from continental Europe and the United Kingdom offer discussions of method in CDA. A strategy followed by many researchers is to select the social problem first, then look for texts or other semiotic materials that serve to reproduce it, then seek the institutional and power relationships implicit in the discourse.
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Social Positioning
Except for Gal 1989 (cited under Concept History), early discussions of language ideology did not necessarily focus on inequalities and differences internal to a field of social relations. As the study of language ideologies has moved forward, however, it is possible to distinguish three different views on this matter. One view, treating ideology as neutral with regard to the particulars of social positioning, considers language ideology as the intellectual side of a culture of language—a collective set of representations, widely shared in a society, about language and its uses. This view is consistent with the earliest formulations of the concept. A second view, though still proposing that ideological representations of language(s), uses, and users are widely shared, links that relative ideological homogeneity to social domination. That is, writers who take this view see ideology as serving the interests of a dominant social group, but as unquestioned by other people, who, for whatever reason, accede to it. A third view sees ideologies as necessarily differentiated within a society, since every society has internal differences of position and power. These views in linguistic anthropology are clearly related to debates among other social theorists whose views of ideology have varied along similar lines. However, the discussion in linguistic anthropology has entailed another debate, concerning how ideologies of language are expressed. Is a “dominant ideology” (of language) something everybody believes and nobody contests, or is it contested by people less powerful than those whose interests it serves? If they contest it, what is the form in which they do so? Do the less powerful have ideologies of their own, and if so, how are those ideologies manifest? For a debate on these questions, see Kroskrity 1998, Kroskrity 2000, Briggs 1998, and Gal 1998. Relatedly, Hill 1998 offers an analysis of “oppositional discourse.” Meanwhile, the contributors in theBlommaert 1999 collection focus on cases in which opposing language ideologies have come into open contestation. Yet, for Philips 2004, the organization of ideological diversity is more complex, not only a matter of dominance and opposition. Philips prefers an image of the “ecology of ideas” as better capturing that ideological multiplicity and complexity.
Blommaert, Jan, ed. 1999. Language ideological debates. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Contributors offer cases from around the world where ideological issues about language have been openly debated.
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Briggs, Charles. 1998. “You’re a liar—you’re just like a woman!”: Constructing dominant ideologies of language in Warao men’s gossip. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 229–255. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A discussion of genres of overt and covert social critique in a Warao (Venezuela) community. Briggs contends that there is no such thing as an uncontested ideology. Contestation is just more apparent at some moments, and in some forms, than in others.
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Gal, Susan. 1998. Multiplicity and contestation among language ideologies: A commentary. InLanguage ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 317–332. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Commenting on several contributions in this volume, Gal concludes that ideologies of language are always multiple, constructing alternate visions of the same linguistic “reality”; ideologies of language cannot be politically neutral. The important question is how an ideology might become dominant, not whether it is homogeneously accepted.
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Hill, Jane H. 1998. “Today there is no respect”: Nostalgia, “respect,” and oppositional discourse in Mexicano (Nahuatl) language ideology. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 68–86. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A discourse of nostalgia and linguistic purism among Mexicanos, mainly successful men, meets a counterdiscourse among women and others for whom the “good old days”—of monolingual Nahuatl with its honorific registers—were not actually very good.
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Kroskrity, Paul. 1998. Arizona Tewa kiva speech as a manifestation of a dominant language ideology. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 103–122. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Argues that the kiva and its rituals anchor a regime of linguistic value with Tewa kiva speech at its apex, and that this ideology of language is largely unquestioned among Arizona Tewa.
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Kroskrity, Paul. 2000. Language ideologies in the expression and representation of Arizona Tewa ethnic identity. In Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Edited by Paul Kroskrity, 329–359. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
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Kroskrity shows how the language ideology he has identified as “dominant” among Arizona Tewa serves to maintain their ethnic identity in the face of Hopi, Spanish, and English-speaking populations surrounding them.
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Philips, Susan U. 2004. The organization of ideological diversity in discourse: Modern and neotraditional visions of the Tongan state. American Ethnologist 31:231–250.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.2004.31.2.231Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discourse in the Tongan legal system is variously modeled on the traditional Tongan kingdom (and current idealizations of it), British legal discourse, and an international legal community. Philips finds an “ecology” of ideological relations in this diversity.
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Linguistic Construction of Social Difference
Whether or not a society’s various segments give rise to ideologies of their own, how might language be involved in people’s understandings of—and construction of—that social differentiation in the first place? And, conversely, how might people’s understandings of linguistic differentiation contribute to social differentiation? Work addressing this question has roots in an earlier literature by Hymes, Gumperz, and others on social roles as constituted through language; see for example, Hymes 1972, Gumperz 1972, and other studies in the same volume. More recently, Irvine and Gal 2000(see also Irvine 2001 and Gal 2005) focuses on the role of language and linguistic differentiation in the construction of social difference, and vice versa. In a line of argument that recalls the discussion in Barth 1969 of ethnic groups and boundaries, it emphasizes boundary relationships and differentiation as crucial organizing principles in social and linguistic fields, more relevant than group-internal sharing. Silverstein 1998 (and other papers) distinguished the “speech community” from the “language community,” the former characterized by a socially organized repertoire of different ways of speaking, the latter a “community” only in the sense of common adherence to a particular language, with a shared norm of “best” usage. See Irvine 2006 for additional discussion.
Barth, Fredrik, ed. 1969. Ethnic groups and boundaries. Boston: Little, Brown.
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Barth’s introduction, a classic in studies of ethnicity, argues for a focus on the boundaries between ethnic groups rather than on some cultural homogeneity within a group.
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Gal, Susan. 2005. Language ideologies compared: Metaphors of public/private. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15:23–37.
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Comparing concepts of “public” and “private” in eastern Europe and the United States—concepts she finds grounded in ideologies of language—Gal analyzes their use via the semiotic approach developed in Irvine and Gal 2000.
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Gumperz, John J. 1972. Introduction. In Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication. Edited by John Gumperz and Dell Hymes, 1–25. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
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Outlines several key concepts for ethnographic approaches to language, including a view of the “speech community” as organization of linguistic diversity, and social roles as constituted through forms of talk.
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Hymes, Dell H. 1972. Modes of the interaction of language and social life. In Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication. Edited by John Gumperz and Dell Hymes, 35–71. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
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A programmatic piece offering key concepts, a typology of cultural attitudes toward language, and an approach to the ethnographic study of communicative events.
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Irvine, Judith T. 2001. “Style” as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation. In Style and sociolinguistic variation. Edited by Penelope Eckert and John Rickford, 21–43. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Argues for a focus on the differences between styles (of talk or of conduct in general), rather than on characterizing a style in isolation. Discusses how differences between styles are ideologized.
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Irvine, Judith T. 2006. Speech and language community. In Encyclopedia of language and linguistics. 2d ed. Edited by Keith Brown, 689–698. Oxford: Elsevier.
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A review of concepts of “speech community,” “language community,” and related concepts (such as “network” and “community of practice”) as ways of identifying social units for studying language and its uses. Argues that a focus on difference (between units) and ideology is especially analytically productive.
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Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. InRegimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Edited by Paul Kroskrity, 35–83. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
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This article lays out a semiotic approach to language ideology, focusing on processes of differentiation (of linguistic varieties and/or social categories). Three case studies show the effects of ideological processes on linguistic change.
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Silverstein, Michael. 1998. Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities.Annual Review of Anthropology 27:401–426.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.27.1.401Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Silverstein contrasts “speech community” with “language community” and shows the relevance of the contrast for contemporary trends.
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Language Standardization and Its Ideology
Language standardization is a process that several authors have discussed in terms of a dominant ideology of language (Milroy 2001, Silverstein 2000). Standard languages are made, not found. They have to be constructed, and in the process, those who standardize a language also construct a regime of value that places the standard variety at its apex. Haugen 1966 laid out a set of steps in the standardization process, such that a particular way of speaking—a particular linguistic variety out of many that may exist in a speech community—becomes normativized, at least for some purpose (though maybe for many). To select a variety, say some particular dialect, for standardization means downgrading others, even de-legitimating them. It can also mean constructing value-laden implications about the users of the standard, as opposed to users of other varieties. The other varieties may become assimilated to the standard, or they may be considered as “only” local, or defective, in comparison (but see Frekko 2009 and Watts 1999 for cases with interesting twists on this point). Meanwhile the process through which the standard was constructed may be erased, so that the standard itself is naturalized; it seems to have been always already there. When a standardized language becomes the emblem for a nation-state, even an emblem for a particular nation-state’s hegemony over others, people who are not competent in the national standard may be seen as equally incompetent to participate in public political activity (see Blommaert and Verschueren 1998).
Blommaert, Jan, and Jef Verschueren. 1998. The role of language in European nationalist ideologies. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 189–210. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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This study focuses on ideological assumptions, embedded in the discourse of several European newspapers, about ethnic minorities and their languages.
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Frekko, Susan. 2009. “Normal” in Catalonia: Standard language, enregisterment, and the imagination of a national public. Language in Society 38:71–93.
DOI: 10.1017/S0047404508090040Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A newly standardized Catalan language is taken to stand for a Catalan nation, but Frekko argues that the nation is imagined as fragile because the full range of Catalan variation is excluded from view.
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Haugen, Einar. 1966. Dialect, language, nation. American Anthropologist 68:922–935.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1966.68.4.02a00040Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A classic outline of language standardization, its stages, and its political entailments.
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Milroy, James. 2001. Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5:530–555.
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9481.00163Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Milroy describes an “ideology of standard” that surrounds standardized languages and their relationship with other linguistic varieties.
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Silverstein, Michael. 2000. Whorfianism and the linguistic imagination of nationality. InRegimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Edited by Paul Kroskrity, 85–138. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
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Silverstein brings a discussion of Whorfian linguistic determinism to bear upon Benedict Anderson’s influential work on nationalism as “imagined community.” The imagined nation, Silverstein argues, is the entailment of standardized language when and as that language becomes institutionalized.
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Watts, Richard. 1999. The ideology of dialect in Switzerland. In Language ideological debates. Edited by Jan Blommaert, 67–104. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
DOI: 10.1515/9783110808049Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In Switzerland, Swiss German is taken to be a dialect whose standard is located outside the country. Watts explores the ideological and political consequences of this situation, which is unusual in linking images of a country’s political identity with a “dialect” rather than a standard.
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Standard Language Ideologies in the United States
Many works on language ideology explore scenes and issues in the United States, characterizing American language ideology in terms of a value on monolingual, homogeneous American English—an ideology that entails, indeed facilitates, discrimination against speakers of other languages and nonstandard varieties of English. Silverstein 1996 on “monoglot standard,” widely distributed for some years prior to its publication, sparked much of this research. Preston 2004 (among other works) explores American folk concepts about language, while Lippi-Green 1997 details evidence of prejudice against people whose speech does not match a normative model of American “accent” (ideologized as no accent). Milroy 2001 compares American and British ideologies of standard English language, and discusses their roots in different social histories. Ideologies of language and race enter into Bucholtz 2001, Hill 2008, and Morgan 2002. Hill’s work is particularly interesting for its discussions of “Mock Spanish,” a linguistic variety used by Anglo-Americans as a derogatory parody of Spanish. Hill shows that an ideology of domination of Spanish speakers by speakers of American English prevails even among Anglos who are unaware of the implications of their usage, and consider themselves antiracist.
Bucholtz, Mary. 2001. The whiteness of nerds: Superstandard English and racial markedness.Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11:84–100.
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In a discussion of ideology and race, Bucholtz argues that there is a form of “superstandard” English that is deployed by some highly academically oriented youth as an implicit sign of whiteness, i.e., in opposition to talk they perceive as influenced by African-American (or other nonwhite) varieties of English.
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Hill, Jane H. 2008. The everyday language of white racism. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
DOI: 10.1002/9781444304732Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Hill argues that racist ideologies of language are embedded in white Americans’ everyday talk, even for those speakers who abjure racism in principle. Much of the book concerns Anglo-Americans’ use of “Mock Spanish,” but Hill also discusses language related to other targets of racism besides Spanish speakers.
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Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. New York: Routledge.
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This book shows in detail the derogatory images of people who speak English with non-mainstream “accents.” Interviews with such speakers provide accounts of their experiences, and there are also discussions of some important court cases involving linguistic discrimination.
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Milroy, Lesley. 2001. Britain and the United States: Two nations divided by the same language (and different language ideologies). Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10:56–89.
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Compares national-level ideologies of language in the United States and the United Kingdom. In both countries there is a concept of “standard English,” but the specific history and the focus of concern—the varieties deemed most distant from the norm—differ in the two cases.
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Morgan, Marcyliena. 2002. Language, discourse and power in African American culture. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511613616Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Includes discussions of ideologies focused on African-American English, as well as its relationship with normative “standard” varieties.
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Preston, Dennis. 2004. Folk metalanguage. In Metalanguage: Social and ideological perspectives. Edited by Adam Jaworski, Nikolas Coupland, and Dariusz Galasinski, 75–103. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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In this publication as in others, Preston explores American “folk linguistics,” a concept akin to language ideology but more situated in a variationist sociolinguistics than in anthropology or social theory. Preston shows how a folk metalanguage, like other aspects of folk linguistics, attests to the role of standard in American popular notions of language, speakers, and dialect regions.
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Silverstein, Michael. 1996. Monoglot ‘standard’ in America. In The matrix of language: Contemporary linguistic anthropology. Edited by Donald Brenneis and Ronald Macaulay, 284–306. Boulder, CO: Westview.
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Argues that the common understanding of “standard English” and linguistic “correctness” are part of an ideology of language that goes along with an ideology of monolingualism.
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Codification, Orthography, Education
Studies of orthography, dictionary-making, and the writing of descriptive grammars often also concern standardization and its attendant ideologies, whether explicitly or not (see Sebba 2007). Some studies, such as Harries 1995, focus mainly on the history in which languages became codified, and orthographies and texts were developed in them. Makoni and Pennycook 2007 finds the identification of languages and attendant ideologies of “languageness” sufficiently problematic as to require a new critical historiography. Other studies, such as Johnson 2005, Meek 2010, andSchieffelin and Doucet 1998, focus on more contemporary debates. Education is a common site for ideological debate about appropriate orthographies and their use in literacy practices (Jaffe 1999and other works). Fenigsen 1999 focuses on ideological aspects of orthographic choices in print media.
Fenigsen, Janina. 1999. Representing Bajan in print. Cultural Anthropology 14:61–97.
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Bajan (Barbadian Creole) is represented in spellings and grammatical forms that emphasize its distance from normative English, and link it with lower-class speakers, or jokes, or persons accused of crimes.
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Harries, Patrick. 1995. Discovering languages: The historical origins of standard Tsonga in southern Africa. In Language and social history: Studies in South African sociolinguistics. Edited by Raj Mesthrie, 154–175. Cape Town, South Africa: David Phillip.
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Harries argues that missionaries (in effect) invented the language—and its imagined community of speakers—they thought they only described.
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Jaffe, Alexandra. 1999. Ideologies in action: Language politics in Corsica. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Describes the politics of language on Corsica, where Corsican has been giving way to French. Several chapters emphasize language learning and school settings, including orthographic problems.
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Johnson, Sally. 2005. Spelling trouble? Language, ideology and the reform of German orthography. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
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A recent debate on German orthography and on who has the right to make decisions about it.
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Makoni, Sinfree, and Alistair Pennycook, eds. 2007. Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
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In their introduction, the editors argue that “[the identification of] languages, conceptions of “languageness,” and the metalanguage used to describe them are all “inventions,” that is, matters of ideology rather than objective fact. The volume’s collective project is a critical historiography of language.
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Meek, Barbra. 2010. We are our language. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press.
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This book presents a range of language ideology issues concerning Kaska language and people in Yukon Territory, especially language socialization and language revitalization efforts. In addition to school-based attempts, sometimes misguided, to encourage use of the language among Kaska children, Meek focuses on “disjunctures” between and within the various language ideologies at play in this setting.
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Schieffelin, Bambi, and Rochelle Doucet. 1998. The “real” Haitian Creole: Ideology, metalinguistics, and orthographic choice. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 285–316. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Debates over the spelling of words in Haitian Creole are simultaneously debates over what is authentically Haitian, and what the relationship between Haiti and France has been or ought to be.
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Sebba, Mark. 2007. Spelling and society: The culture and politics of orthography around the world. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511486739Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A survey of the social and political contexts of writing and spelling systems, along with debates about them, in many regions of the world.
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Sites and Sightings
What are the social fields and groupings where language ideologies might be investigated? The concept of “speech community” as developed by Gumperz and Hymes (e.g., Gumperz 1968, among other works) proposed that the local organization of linguistic diversity was empirically identifiable as a social field; Hymes 1968 in particular warned that speech communities might not coincide with ethnic groups, or with the set of speakers of some particular language, or with any other preconceived unit. The concept proved difficult to operationalize, however, and difficult to disentangle from other notions of “community.” Hymes’s warning has had to be reiterated; for a recent version, see Rumsey 2010. One of the difficulties stems from the prevalence of language-based models of society, especially in the Herderian tradition (Bauman and Briggs 2003)—an ideology, pervasive even in academic writing outside this subdiscipline, of homogeneous language as the foundation of social unity (see Linguistic Construction of Social Difference). Like other anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists no longer privilege the village or the ethnic group as the sole appropriate sites for research. On the contrary: The concept of “site” of language ideology has itself been problematized (Silverstein 1998). Philips 2000, in particular, distinguishes among several types of site, taking “site” to refer to a kind of social scene in which language, ideology, and social relations are co-constructed. For example, “crucial sites,” in Philips’s formulation, are those where important ideological work takes place, while “key sites” are those that serve as models, or reference points, for such work. Wee 2006 draws on Philips’s discussions.
Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs. 2003. Voices of modernity: Language ideologies and the politics of inequality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511486647Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Locates the rise of ideas about “modernity” in 17th- and 18th-century works about language, especially the language of scientific and literary analysis. The authors argue that these language-based concepts of “modernity” entailed a new kind of inequality between people using new modes of discourse and people using older ones, an inequality perpetuated in early (and later) philology and anthropology.
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Gumperz, John J. 1968. The speech community. In International encyclopedia of the social sciences. Edited by David L. Sills, 381–386. New York: Macmillan.
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Classic discussion of speech community as an organization of diversity.
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Hymes, Dell H. 1968. Linguistic problems in defining the concept of “tribe.” Paper presented at the annual spring meeting of the American Ethnological Society, San Francisco, 23–25 March 1967. In Essays on the problem of tribe. Edited by June Helm, 23–48. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press.
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A tour de force arguing that the particular relationships between languages, populations, and social formations are empirically variable; languages do not map automatically onto social formations of some predetermined kind (such as ethnic groups). Evidence against the assumption that languages correspond to ethnic groups is drawn from all over the world.
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Philips, Susan U. 2000. Constructing a Tongan nation-state through language ideology in the courtroom. In Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Edited by Paul Kroskrity, 229–257. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
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Language use in Tongan law courts entails an ideology of language that is simultaneously an ideologized vision of the Tongan nation-state. Philips argues that the way the nation-state is imagined depends in part on a model of brother-sister relationships in domestic settings.
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Rumsey, Alan. 2010. Lingual and cultural wholes and fields. In Experiments in holism. Edited by Ton Otto and Nils Burbandt, 127–149. Oxford: Blackwell.
DOI: 10.1002/9781444324426Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Rumsey argues that languages (and cultures) are better thought of in relation to one another within larger fields than conceived as distinct wholes. Evidence is drawn from a wide range of settings, from aboriginal Australia to continental Europe.
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Silverstein, Michael. 1998. The uses and utility of ideology: A commentary. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 123–148. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Commenting on a set of papers in this volume, Silverstein concludes with a discussion of sites—in various linguistic, textual, and ritual forms—in which one might seek manifestations of language ideologies.
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Wee, Lionel. 2006. The semiotics of language ideologies in Singapore. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10:344–361.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1360-6441.2006.00331.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
To describe ideologies of language in Singapore, Wee draws on Philips’s typology of “sites” as well as on the Irvine/Gal model of linguistic differentiation (see Semiotic Processes).
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Ideologies Under Construction
Some of the research on language ideology, and some on political ideology, investigates the ways ideologies are internally constructed—how the pieces of an ideological system are put together, how the system is formed, or how important concepts are linked. There are several main approaches to this question. One relies heavily on Peircean semiotics (Semiotic Processes); a second focuses on the formation of linguistic stereotypes (Construction of Registers and Stereotypes). Some of Silverstein’s work partakes of both. Another approach, though connected with Silverstein’s, proposes that language ideologies are formed in layers. Finally, an approach deriving from political science focuses on the ways major political concepts are interlinked within an ideology (Ideological “Layers” and Ideological “Morphology”).
Semiotic Processes
An important strand of research on language ideologies relies on an analytical approach derived from C. S. Peirce’s semiotics. On the Peircean basics, see Peirce 1955, and an excellent exegesis,Parmentier 1994. Silverstein 1976 is the paper that effectively brought Peircean analysis into linguistic anthropology, and many later papers by Silverstein follow up on this approach. The joint work by Gal and Irvine (e.g., Irvine and Gal 2000 and related papers) uses a Peircean framework to propose how ideologized visions of languages, speakers, and communicative practices are semiotically constructed out of more basic elements of experience. Irvine and Gal 2000 dissects the construction of language ideologies into three linked semiotic processes: “iconization” (later termed “rhematization”), fractal recursivity, and erasure. These three aspects of the process account for how an ideology is built up through transformations of sign-relations, so that a vision of languages, speakers, and social activities comes to seem natural, to apply at any level of inclusiveness of social or linguistic organization from the narrowest to the broadest scope, and to erase from view any inconvenient sociolinguistic facts that fail to fit the construct. Works that draw on the Irvine/Gal model include Kuipers 1998 and various articles in recent issues of the journals that publish in this field (see Journals). Another work that draws on Peircean sign-relations to analyze the workings of language ideology is Inoue 2006 (and related papers), which discusses ideologies of language, gender, and modernity in Japan. Inoue proposes that “indexical inversion”—a reversal of relations between indexical sign and its object—can be an important ingredient in the formation of an ideological construct. Scholars who have focused on the Peircean concept of iconicity in ideology include Herzfeld 1986 and Eisenlohr 2004. Keane 1997, also taking a Peircean approach to his Indonesian ethnography, discusses relations between linguistic and material objects.
Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2004. Temporalities of community: Ancestral language, pilgrimage, and diasporic belonging in Mauritius. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14:81–98.
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Eisenlohr draws on Peircean sign-relations to show how, in various realms (including language), Mauritians of Indian origin see themselves as one with Hindus in South Asia.
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Herzfeld, Michael. 1986. On some rhetorical uses of iconicity in cultural ideologies. InIconicity: Essays on the nature of culture. Edited by Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, and Roland Posner, 401–419. Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg.
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This discussion of how rhetorical language can make use of the Peircean concept of iconicity represents a more culturally than linguistically oriented view of ideology, but it is still relevant.
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Inoue, Miyako. 2006. Vicarious language: Gender and linguistic modernity in Japan. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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A historical and ethnographic approach to the study of gender relations in Japan. Inoue sees ideologies of gender as importantly linked to the history of Japanese ideas about “women’s language.”
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Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. InRegimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Edited by Paul Kroskrity, 35–84. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
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A semiotic model of ideological process is argued with respect to three cases of linguistic change: the Nguni languages of South Africa, the major languages of Senegal, and Macedonian.
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Keane, E. Webb. 1997. Signs of recognition: Powers and hazards of representation in an Indonesian society. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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In this book and other works, Keane draws on a Peircean semiotics in discussions of language and materiality in Indonesia.
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Kuipers, Joel. 1998. Language, identity, and marginality in Indonesia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511558191Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Kuipers takes up the Irvine/Gal semiotic approach in describing changes in language ideology in Sumba, as the Sumbanese became more integrated into the Indonesian state and began to see their own practices as peripheral and backward, in relation to a national center.
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Parmentier, Richard. 1994. Peirce divested for nonintimates. In Signs in society. By Richard Parmentier, 3–22. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
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A very useful exegesis of Peirce’s theory of semiotics. Signs in Society is a collection of Parmentier’s essays, some of which concern language ideology. Originally published in 1987.
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Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. Logic as semiotic: The theory of signs. In Philosophical writings of Peirce. Edited by Justus Buchler, 98–119. New York: Dover.
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This exposition of Peirce’s semiotic theory was pieced together from several of Peirce’s manuscripts. Peirce’s view of the sign—linguistic or otherwise—differs from the well-known discussions of the linguistic sign by Ferdinand de Saussure, for example in not separating signs from the material world. Originally published in 1902.
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Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In Meaning in anthropology. Edited by Keith Basso and Henry Selby, 11–56. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
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This highly influential paper, included in the publication of a seminar at the School of American Research, brought ideas about language from Jakobson and Peirce into anthropological context. Among the essay’s important contributions are ideas about “creative presupposition” in which a bit of discourse creates the social relations it presupposes. Many themes of this major scholar’s later work are prefigured here.
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Construction of Registers and Stereotypes
Another strand of research focuses on the formation of cultural stereotypes and linguistic registers (stereotyped ways of speaking—typifications of the “voices” of social personae and their activities). In focusing on the formation of those typifications, this work differs from older research that only set forth the stereotypes as already given. It also differs from those kinds of variationist sociolinguistic work that discover correlations between linguistic variants and social categories, and interpret these correlations as underlying speakers’ choices of linguistic usage. As Silverstein 2005 argues, the social indexicality that links signs to persons, activities, and so on is not “natural”; instead, it is always emergent in social processes, via the power of linguistic ideology. The research that tracks the formation of linguistic and cultural stereotypes emphasizes the links between events of talk—interdiscursivity, or “semiosis across encounters,” as Agha has called it: the capacity of linguistic (and other) signs to forge links across events in ways that yield social types and formations. Although Agha rarely draws on the vocabulary of “language ideology,” preferring other terminology, his work (Agha 1998, Agha 2005, Agha 2007) is clearly relevant to this field. Influential earlier work that similarly tracked links between discourse events includes the studies in Silverstein and Urban 1996, and the related Bauman and Briggs 1990. On stereotyping, for a view from psychology, seeHilton and von Hippel 1996. Other relevant work in psychology has looked at essentialism, concept formation, and social cognition. See especially work by Gelman and her colleagues (Gelman 1999and other works), and relevant articles in the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. For a more anthropological discussion of essentialism, focused on an ethnographic case from East Africa, see McIntosh 2005.
Agha, Asif. 1998. Stereotypes and registers of honorific language. Language in Society27:151–194.
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Discusses the relationship between honorific language and the emergence of cultural stereotypes. Also develops a view of honorific registers that shows the difference between the use of honorific lexicon in actual talk, and its precipitate in ideologies of language (such as the notion of language “levels”).
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Agha, Asif. 2005. Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15:38–59.
DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.38Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Proposes a continuum of typifications of ways of speaking, from the least to the most socially institutionalized. On one end is the notion of a “voice” as a way of speaking that is characteristic of a particular individual; further along are the voices of (social) types of individuals and further still are named, institutionalized linguistic varieties associated with social groups and activities.
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Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and social relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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A tour de force that builds a picture of social relations out of the use of linguistic signs in interaction. Agha begins with humans’ capacity for reflexivity, as manifest in language, and builds up various kinds of typifications of linguistic usage as these emerge in, and contribute to, social relations. The book ends with a chapter on language in kinship structures and relations.
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Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs. 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59–88.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.19.100190.000423Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In addition to reviewing literature on poetics and performance, the authors anticipate the concept of “entextualization” and links between events of talk that were eventually published in Silverstein and Urban 1996.
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Gelman, Susan. 1999. Essentialism. In MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences. Edited by Robert A. Wilson and Frank Keil, 282–284. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Gelman succinctly summarizes ideas about cognitive essentialism that have emerged in her own work and that of other developmental psychologists. Though not explicitly focused on ideology, this work is very useful.
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Hilton, James L., and William von Hippel. 1996. Stereotypes. Annual Review of Psychology47:237–271.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.psych.47.1.237Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A review of literature in psychology that discusses stereotyping, especially of human social groups, and tries to account for stereotyping as a cognitive process in social context.
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McIntosh, Janet. 2005. Language essentialism and social hierarchies among Giriama and Swahili. Journal of Pragmatics 37:1919–1944.
DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2005.01.010Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Though alluding to semiotic models, McIntosh draws more heavily on the notion of essentialism as discussed in recent developmental psychology in this discussion of language ideologies in Kenya.
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Silverstein, Michael. 2005. Axes of evals: Token versus type interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15:6–22.
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Discusses various kinds of interdiscursive links: the discourse in event A links it to the discourse in event B, as in, “that’s just like what you said yesterday.”
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Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban, eds. 1996. Natural histories of discourse. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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The papers in this collection track discourse across related events of talk, observing how, in some events, discourse is “entextualized”—stripped of pragmatic links to the here and now, thus turned into “text”—and then reinserted (“recontextualized”) into another event, for various purposes.
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Ideological “Layers” and Ideological “Morphology”
As was noted in Construction of Registers and Stereotypes, Agha has seldom discussed “voice” and “enregisterment” in terms of ideology. But the typifications Agha discusses are clearly part of how ideologizing works. Blommaert 2005 brings studies of typifications and “voice” more explicitly into relation with research on “ideology.” In so doing, he proposes a layered view of discourse contexts, such that ideologies (also layered) are seen as operating in and through polycentric and stratified systems—stratified in the sense of the relatively wider or narrower scope of an institution or practice. Thus, there are very local practices pertaining to a level of interpersonal interaction and practices of wider scope, such as those organizing a workplace, an institution, or society at large. Meanwhile, another approach to the internal workings of ideology is offered in Freeden 1996 and Freeden 2003, which propose that ideologies have “morphology”—an internal coherence provided by the ways their central concepts are linked. Because Freeden is interested in political language and sees ideology principally in terms of concepts and their meanings, his work has some connection with anthropological work on language ideology. He argues that all ideologies have a core of key concepts; some are central, others add specificity to the central ones, while still others are relevant but marginal. Ideologies can be compared according to what concepts take priority and how they are linked to other concepts. Perhaps in keeping with his disciplinary identity as a political scientist, most of his work has focused on the great “isms” of political theory—socialism, Nazism, liberalism, conservatism, and a side glance at feminism. In recent work, however, Freeden has also considered “micro-ideologies,” proposing notions of the relative “thickness” of an ideology’s morphology, and the scope of its purview.
Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse: A critical introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511610295Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A wide-ranging discussion that includes a chapter on (language) ideology.
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Freeden, Michael. 1996. Ideologies and political theory. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A large-scale work in political theory, with explorations of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and other prominent political ideologies. A chapter titled “Assembling: From Concepts to Ideologies” lays out an account of the internal structure of an ideology—the relations among its central concepts—and the relationship with “political words.”
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Freeden, Michael. 2003. Ideology: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A compact and very accessible version of Freeden 1996, this “introduction” includes a brief overview of the history of scholarly writing on “ideology,” a discussion of several important “isms,” and Freeden’s proposals about the internal structure of an ideology—its morphology.
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Finding Ideology in Discursive Practice
Where, in discursive practice, are ideologies of language manifest? If ideologies pervade the moral life of language, then their traces should be pervasive too. Because language is the semiotic modality that best permits the human capacity for reflexivity to be expressed, talk about language and talk about its uses and users is an obvious place to look for formulations that take part in ideological processes (Metalanguage, Metapragmatics, Narrative). The extent to which language ideologies are to be observed in explicit assertions, as compared with implicit discursive practice, has been debated. The distinction has been somewhat overstated; explicit assertions are themselves a form of practice, and have specifiable social distributions. Still, some traces of ideologizing will be more conspicuous than others, and more readily available to analysis. Meanwhile, finding traces of language ideologies raises questions about how the traces fit together, that is, questions about ideological coherence and consistency (Ideological Consistency and Disjuncture).
Metalanguage, Metapragmatics, Narrative
Language ideologies crucially involve reflexivity, the human capacity for stepping back from, representing, and reflecting on one’s own ongoing activity; in language, those representations are incorporated in the activity itself. Theoretical discussions of reflexivity range beyond the field of language ideology, yet they include ideas about metalevels of representation on which language ideology research depends. On the importance of reflexivity for linguistic theory, and an argument that “first-order” language could not even exist without “second-order” reflexive properties, see Taylor 2000; see also Jakobson 1980. Agha 2007 argues that this property of language, expressed in metalanguage and metapragmatics—talk referring to language, and talk referring to language use—ultimately gives rise to many forms of social relations. Studies in Lucy 1993 focus on metapragmatic discourse and reported speech; Silverstein, in his contribution to the volume (Silverstein 1993), points out that metapragmatic discourse encapsulates ideologies of language use and plays into their institutionalization. Among the linguistic forms these studies attend to are quotations (and quotative affixes in languages that have these), other forms of reported speech, narratives and their framing, metapragmatic terminology (such as “plead,” “decorate my speech,” “scold,” “wonder,” and so on), strategies of textual interpretation, and switches of language as ways of switching the relevant context in which the talk is to be understood. Other useful works discuss narrative as a way of making sense of experience; prominent examples of such writings include Ochs 2004 (and other works), Bruner 1991, and McHugh 1995. Meanwhile, Puckett 2000 offers an extended ethnographic example revealing the importance of metadiscourse. What remains a question for debate is whether all metalanguage and metapragmatics is part of language ideology or whether there is reason to consider these as distinct, though overlapping, realms.
Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and social relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Agha builds a picture of social relations out of the use of linguistic signs in interaction. The discussion of various kinds of typifications of linguistic usage as these emerge in, and contribute to, social relations, includes considerable attention to metalanguage and metapragmatics.
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Bruner, Jerome. 1991. The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry 18:1–21.
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Arguing that narrative is a crucial means by which people make sense of their experience and develop a feeling for what is “real,” Bruner lays out a set of ten features of narrative, such as: narratives establish a sequence of events (diachronicity); they are about particular people and specific occurrences (particularity); they include a consideration of motives and intentions; and so on.
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Jakobson, Roman. 1980. Metalanguage as a linguistic problem. In The framework of language. By Roman Jakobson, 81–92. Ann Arbor: Michigan Studies in the Humanities.
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Argues that human language in its present form would be impossible without metalanguage. Proposes that all acts of speaking are multifunctional—a communicative act has many dimensions, each of which could be considered a “function”—expressive (focus on the speaker), conative (focus on the addressee, and the utterance’s persuasive effects), referential, metalinguistic, and others. Originally a public lecture delivered in 1956.
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Lucy, John, ed. 1993. Reflexive language: Reported speech and metapragmatics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This substantial volume collects a wide range of studies, some mainly theoretical and others concerning particular ethnographic or literary cases. All papers focus on reported speech and talk about talk.
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McHugh, Paul. 1995. What’s the story? American Scholar 64:191–203.
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Links medical case histories to the study of narrative.
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Ochs, Elinor. 2004. Narrative lessons. In A companion to linguistic anthropology. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, 269–289. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Ten “lessons” in the analysis of narrative are linked to a discussion of ways narratives serve their tellers to make sense of experience or to justify a position.
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Puckett, Anita. 2000. Seldom ask, never tell: Labor and discourse in Appalachia. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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An ethnographic study of a regional ideology of language. Among the evidence under consideration are types of speech acts, their frequency and manifestation, and metadiscourse about them.
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Silverstein, Michael. 1993. Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In Reflexive language: Reported speech and metapragmatics. Edited by John Lucy, 33–57. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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A theoretically oriented essay on what metapragmatic discourse is and how it works in social life. Metapragmatic discourse encapsulates ideologies of language use and plays into their institutionalization.
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Taylor, Talbot. 2000. Language constructing language. Language Sciences 22:483–499.
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Argues that human language, as we know it, could not exist without the reflexivity that is manifest in metalinguistic talk.
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Ideological Consistency and Disjuncture
Must an ideology—of language or anything else—be internally consistent? While there are not a great many works in language ideology that have taken up this question, it is related to whether an author discusses ideological multiplicity and opposition. Meek 2010 focuses directly on disjunctures in language ideology. Related work includes Gal 1998 and Gal 2005. Classic discussions of ideological contradiction that do not draw on a vocabulary of “language ideology” but remain relevant to that field include Fanon 1967 and Foucault 1972. Freeden 2007 discusses the indeterminacies and fragmentations that can be found in political ideologies. Since Freeden builds his approach to ideology on “essentially contestable” concepts and their relationships to each other, the possibilities are rife for indeterminacies and disagreements on ideological particulars.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The negro and language. In Black skin, white masks. By Frantz Fanon, 1–23. Translated by C. L. Markmann. New York: Grove.
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In this chapter, Fanon describes the Antillean language user as lacking, caught between a French he aspires to but can never be seen as properly speaking, and a Creole that is always defined as failing to be French (but not being African either). Originally published in 1952.
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Foucault, Michel. 1972. Contradictions. In The archaeology of knowledge. By Michel Foucault, 149–156. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon.
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In this chapter, Foucault discusses contradiction by comparing it with various types of coherence one might have looked for in discourse. Because contradictions give rise to attempts to resolve them, “Contradiction functions throughout discourse as the principle of its historicity,” he writes. Originally published in 1969.
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Freeden, Michael. 2007. Ideology and political theory. In The meaning of ideology: Cross-disciplinary perspectives. Edited by Michael Freeden. London: Routledge.
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This recent work by a political scientist well known for his work on ideology in political theory includes new discussions of indeterminacy and fragmentation in (political) ideologies.
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Gal, Susan. 1998. Multiplicity and contention among language ideologies. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 317–332. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Discusses four themes relating to ideological multiplicity and contestation: matters of scale; the “semiotics of dominance”; the relationship between ideas about language and ideas about other things; and representations of sociolinguistic difference.
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Gal, Susan. 2005. Language ideologies compared: Metaphors of public/private. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15:23–37.
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Some apparent contradictions within an ideology of language can be accounted for via “fractal recursivity,” one of the semiotic processes in the Irvine/Gal model.
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Meek, Barbra. 2010. We are our language. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press.
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This book treats a range of language ideology issues concerning Kaska language and people in Yukon Territory, especially language socialization and language revitalization efforts. In addition to school-based attempts, sometimes misguided, to encourage use of the language among Kaska children, Meek focuses on “disjunctures” between and within the various language ideologies at play in this setting.
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Institutional Settings
Althusser 1971, a classic essay in Marxist theory, linked ideology with ideological state apparatuses (ISAs): institutions through which, he argued, an ideology supporting the ruling class is promulgated. An ISA need not be managed directly by the state in order to support a dominant class and its political-economic position, or to produce and reproduce the social system that makes that class dominant. This essay has been influential outside Marxism as well as within it, and for scholars interested in language ideology it has spurred research on ideology in institutional discourse. If institutions are relatively stable, recognized complexes of roles and practices, including linguistic practices, then that “recognition” of forms of talk and scenes of institutional activity places them within our field of study. Philips 1998 finds that there are special virtues and strengths to studies of language ideology in specific institutions. In her essay, Philips comments on a set of studies of institutional discourse where the institutions concerned—law schools and state-run media—are centrally involved in the production of state hegemony. Such studies make it possible to see how language ideologies are socially ordered in those institutions; how powerful language and language ideologies are in the imagining of nations; and how one might take the next analytical steps of exploring how language ideologies might flow, or not, from one institution to another, or transnationally. (See Pennycook 1998 and Pennycook 2010 for relevant discussions of those kinds of flow.)
Althusser, Louis. 1971. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In Lenin and philosophy and other essays. By Louis Althusser, 85–126. New York: Monthly Review Press.
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Presents a view of ideology as lived experience, offering subject positions and bases for social action. Discusses ideology as embedded in institutions, and as the means by which the state, or other social power, reproduces itself. The ruling power thus relies not only on armed force, but also on “ideological state apparatuses.”
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Pennycook, Alistair. 1998. English and the discourses of colonialism. New York: Routledge.
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Discusses the ways an imperial and colonial politics are embedded in colonial language policy, in writings on English-language teaching, and in many texts on the English language and its spread. Sources are diverse, but Asian contexts predominate.
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Pennycook, Alistair. 2010. Language as a local practice. New York: Routledge.
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Exploring relationships among language, locality, and practice, and comparing local language ideologies to external ones, Pennycook emphasizes the locality of both power and resistance.
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Philips, Susan. 1998. Language ideologies in institutions of power: A commentary. InLanguage ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 211–227. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Argues for the importance of paying attention to large-scale institutions and the discourse occurring in them, in studies of language ideologies. At the time Philips was writing this piece, in the mid-1990s, the study of institutional discourse tended to be undertaken in other disciplinary frameworks, not ethnographic. Though still wishing to build on that earlier work, Philips proposed a more anthropological approach to institutional discourse.
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Legal Institutions
Important research on language ideology has focused on legal institutions (law schools and law courts, in various countries). Philips is a leader in this field, with close ethnographic studies of US courtrooms (Philips 1998 and other works) as well as the legal system in the Pacific nation of Tonga (Philips 2004, among other essays). Hirsch 1998 studies Islamic courts in Kenya; Mertz 2007 studies classroom interaction in American law schools; Richland 2008 explores language ideology in Hopi Tribal Court. These are only a few examples from a growing field of research.
Hirsch, Susan. 1998. Pronouncing and persevering: Gender and the discourses of disputing in an African Islamic court. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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A study of discourse in the Islamic court system in Kenya. Women sometimes bring complaints to these courts; Hirsch discusses how and why they do so, and how their cases are handled.
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Mertz, Elizabeth. 2007. The language of law: Learning to “think like a lawyer.” New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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This book presents Mertz’s many years of research on American law schools, the ideologies of language found there, and the ways these ideologies influence the discourse in law school classrooms.
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Philips, Susan U. 1998. Ideology in the language of judges. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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This book considers the relationship between courtroom discourse, the role of judges, and the conduct of cases. Philips focuses especially on the way judges take guilty pleas from criminal defendants, how they present instructions to the jury, and how they comment on their own behavior. She argues that ideological struggles over language and language use are central, though hidden, in courtroom discourse.
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Philips, Susan U. 2004. The organization of ideological diversity in discourse: Modern and neotraditional visions of the Tongan state. American Ethnologist 31:231–250.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.2004.31.2.231Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discourse in the Tongan legal system is variously modeled on the traditional Tongan kingdom (and current idealizations of it), British legal discourse, and an international legal community. Philips finds an “ecology” of ideological relations in this diversity.
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Richland, Justin. 2008. Arguing with tradition: The language of law in Hopi Tribal Court. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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This impressive study of Hopi Tribal Court is written by an anthropologist who is also a Hopi judge in such a court. It contains discussions of various aspects of language use, and ideologies of language, in the court as it mediates between Hopi tribal “tradition” and the American legal system.
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The Media
Much other research concerns language ideologies in the media, especially in the production of radio and television programs and newspapers. Spitulnik 1998 (and other papers) covers Zambian national radio programming and policy, while Garrett 2000 shows how a radio program and its announcer contributed to reconfiguring the system of linguistic varieties in Haiti. Blommaert and Verschueren 1998 explores nationalist ideologies of language in European newspapers, while the contributors to the edited volume on media Johnson and Milani 2010 range among various media around the world. These are only a few examples of what has become a burgeoning literature. An essay (Rahman 2009) on telephone call centers in Pakistan is included.
Blommaert, Jan, and Jef Verschueren. 1998. The role of language in European nationalist ideologies. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 189–210. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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The authors examine texts from several European newspapers and consider the ideologies underlying the ways these texts represent ethnic minorities and their languages.
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Garrett, Paul. 2000. “High” Kwéyòl: The emergence of a formal Creole register in St. Lucia. InLanguage change and language contact in pidgins and Creoles. Edited by John McWhorter, 63–102. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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The discussion focuses on radio programming, in which a new, “high” variety of Kwéyòl emerges in relation to existing linguistic hierarchies.
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Johnson, Sally, and Tommaso Milani, eds. 2010. Language ideologies and media discourse: Texts, practices, politics. London: Continuum.
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A collection of papers on language ideologies as they are manifested in, and reproduced by, media discourse. The papers variously concern print and audiovisual media from around the world and ranging from early commercial sound recordings to computer games.
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Rahman, Tariq. 2009. Language ideology, identity and the commodification of language in the call centers of Pakistan. Language in Society 38:233–258.
DOI: 10.1017/S0047404509090344Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focuses on the relative desirability of various accents in call center workers’ spoken English, and links these kinds of linguistic capital to larger issues of language ideology and class relations in Pakistan.
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Spitulnik, Debra. 1998. Mediating unity and diversity: The production of language ideologies in Zambian broadcasting. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 163–188. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Although Zambian policy for the country’s many languages professes equality in language rights for its citizens, the production of radio programming tells a different story. Which languages are chosen for programming, what the program hours are, and what news stories (local only or national and international) are broadcast in them, reveal assumptions of inequality.
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Educational Institutions
Some of the works most explicitly focusing on language ideology in educational institutions are the studies by Alexandra Jaffe and Stanton Wortham. Jaffe 1999 (and a series of articles) has focused on language ideology in Corsica, primarily in schools. Wortham 2008 addresses issues of language ideology in American schools; Wortham’s earlier writings, such as Wortham 2005, are highly relevant even though “language ideology” as a concept is not as much foregrounded in them. Meanwhile, there is an enormous literature on language in classroom interaction, as well as language policy in schools. Some of these works are relevant to language ideology whether or not they draw on that concept explicitly. In studies of American public education, the Ebonics controversy and the debates over bilingual education are salient topics (see, for example, Collins 1999). Although most studies of language in schools have looked at primary schools and, to a lesser extent, secondary schools, recently there have been some studies of language use and language ideologies in higher education, including Blum 2009 and Urciuoli 2009.
Blum, Susan. 2009. My word! Plagiarism and college culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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A study of the divergent ideas about authorship and teamwork among college students and faculty. Blum finds that college students do not generally have the same ideologies of independent authorship that faculty have; students’ literacy practices outside of formal academic work have been more collaborative. In consequence, faculty members find themselves worrying about plagiarism and having difficulty explaining to students why they think it problematic.
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Collins, James. 1999. The Ebonics controversy in context: Literacies, subjectivities, and language ideologies in the United States. In Language ideological debates. Edited by Jan Blommaert, 201–234. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
DOI: 10.1515/9783110808049Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A discussion of the language ideologies involved in the debate over the role of African-American linguistic varieties—“Ebonics”—in school literacy instruction.
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Jaffe, Alexandra. 1999. Ideologies in action: Language politics on Corsica. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Though ranging widely over social situations on Corsica, the book devotes considerable space to educational settings.
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Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2009. Talking/not talking about race: The enregisterments of culture in higher education discourses. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19:21–39.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2009.01017.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discusses discourses about “diversity” in higher education, especially in administration, and their relationship to race.
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Wortham, Stanton. 2005. Learning identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Discusses “models” and stereotypes of students, whose academic performance is strongly tied to their emerging identifications among this range of models.
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Wortham, Stanton. 2008. Linguistic anthropology of education. Encyclopedia of language and education 3:849–859.
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Includes a general discussion of language ideology in educational institutions.
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Boundary Practices
How might ideologies be involved in constructing and regimenting difference—linguistic and/or social? An important theme in studies of language ideology has concerned their role in creating and maintaining boundaries between languages, and boundaries between social categories understood as language-based. Some of this research (e.g., Suleiman 2003) focuses on ethnicity, nationalism, and the Herderian tradition in which a shared language is imagined as the basis of the “spirit” (culture) and identity of a people (Volk and Volksgeist). Included here are cases in which there is an emergent sense of nationhood grounded in separate language; cases in which linguistic relatedness—or a claim of relatedness—becomes the basis of a claim to common nationhood (Eisenlohr 2006); and historically oriented studies, especially of colonial regimes, in which outsiders identified languages they took to coincide with ethnic groups, for purposes of administration or religious evangelizing. Woolard 2004 discusses an interesting case involving language ideologies in early modern Spain. The ideologies of linguists themselves are important, where linguists have acted as codifiers of languages and agents of standardization. Potentially important as well are the language ideologies of the state, which may try to regiment imagined ethnic or subnational identities among its citizens on linguistic grounds (Lemon 2000, Blommaert 1999). Other research has focused on cases of language contact, that is, contact between speakers of different languages, especially when the speakers were not previously known to each other. In some cases, new languages or varieties of language have emerged out of the contact situation (Jourdan 2007), while in other cases, language shift has prevailed, so that some language or languages fall out of use, in favor of others (Errington 1998). Translation practices (Jaffe 1999), where language differences are made salient even in the moment of bridging them, are also relevant. While language contact and translation have long histories of study, what is new in this research is its strong emphasis on ideology (about the relevant languages, their speakers, and their appropriate uses), rather than the structural properties of the languages, or statistical accounts of usage.
Blommaert, Jan. 1999. State ideology and language in Tanzania. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.
DOI: 10.1515/9783110808049Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A study of language ideology in state policy in Tanzania, and, in comparison, the language uses (and ideologies) of Tanzanian people in a range of settings, especially urban settings.
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Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2006. Little India: Diaspora, time, and ethnolinguistic belonging in Hindu Mauritius. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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This study of an Indian population living in linguistically diverse Mauritius shows how Hindu activists promote a transnational ideology linking Hinduism, Hindi language, and South Asian origins. Cultural practices based on this ideology lead to a transformation in the way Hindu Mauritians experience temporal relationships between diaspora and homeland.
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Errington, J. Joseph. 1998. Shifting languages: Interaction and identity in Javanese Indonesia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511612480Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores changing conversational practices in two communities in Java, in relation to issues of ethnicity, nationalism, and political ideology. The Indonesian state has promoted the use of the Indonesian language, a language constructed (out of a form of Malay) for nationalist purposes, to replace local languages such as Javanese. Errington observes the shifts in usage and the state institutions and ideologies that encourage them.
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Jaffe, Alexandra. 1999. Locating power: Corsican translators and their critics. In Language ideological debates. Edited by Jan Blommaert, 39–66. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
DOI: 10.1515/9783110808049Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discusses debates over the use of French or Corsican, in an era of nationalist revival and promotion of Corsican language and literary genres. Translators find themselves agents in the debate over the best Corsican, what genres can and should be written in it, whether translation should be from French to Corsican or Corsican to French or neither, and so on.
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Jourdan, Christine. 2007. Linguistic paths to urban self in postcolonial Solomon Islands. InConsequences of contact: Language ideologies and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies. Edited by Miki Makihara and Bambi Schieffelin, 30–48. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Explores the changing ideologies of the relationship between local, “ethnic” languages in the Solomons and Pijin, now increasingly a signal of urban identity.
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Lemon, Alaina. 2000. Between two fires: Gypsy performance and Romani memory from Pushkin to postsocialism. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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Discusses the ideologies of language and nationality pertaining to Roma in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Starting with the Soviet-era Romani Theater, Lemon explores state policies that constrained Romani language and performance in the theater, and how Roma actions have related to the stereotypes Russians have of them.
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Suleiman, Yasir. 2003. The Arabic language and national identity: A study in ideology. Washington, DC: Georgetown Univ. Press.
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A discussion of the relationships between local varieties of spoken Arabic, the classical and written varieties, and the political ideologies that are involved in how these relationships are interpreted.
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Woolard, Kathryn. 2004. Is the past a foreign country? Time, language origins, and the nation in early modern Spain. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14:57–80.
DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2004.14.1.57Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A 16th-century debate over the historical relationship between Spanish (Castilian) and Latin is discussed in relation to emerging ideologies of nationhood.
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Historical Dynamics
A longstanding goal in language ideology research is to understand the role of ideology in linguistic and social change. The above-mentioned studies of language contact, standardization, and emergent language-based identifications (ethnonational and otherwise) engage this goal. So does process-oriented research such as Irvine and Gal 2000, as well as research on more general issues of sociolinguistic change. Silverstein 2003, for example, argues that whenever people perceive differences in languages and language use, and connect these differences to social identities or activities, the perception is ideologized and influences the perceivers’ own usage. The dialectic between ideology and usage drives sociolinguistic change. Another body of research has focused on concepts of “modernity” as based on ideologies of language. Bauman and Briggs 2003 contends that the idea of “modernity” in western Europe and North America has depended on new ways of imagining language—making language safe for science, for certain class and commercial interests, and for a politics engaged with the (standardized) printed word. The same modernity that created new regimes of discursive practice also created a break with older ones, and created inequalities between those people trained in the new ways of using language and those people whose usage betrayed their social otherness. Over the decades, linguists have brought various ideologies to the project of documenting non-European languages, and these ideologies influence how such languages are represented, not only to outsiders, but also to their own speakers. French 2003 offers a study of these linguist projects in Guatemala. Concepts of “modernity” also enter into the journal special issue edited by Inoue on ideologies of history—and temporality in general—in language (Inoue 2004). Inoue 2006, a monograph on Japan, follows up on these themes, linking ideologies of linguistic modernity to the history of gender images. Smith-Hefner 2009, discussing language ideology in Indonesia, similarly looks at “modernity” and gender issues, but in a situation of language shift. Finally, there is a growing body of work on linguistic aspects of globalization, the local effects of global currents, and the construction of a sense of local identification and authenticity. Some of this research engages with concepts of language ideology. Kulick 1998 provides an example of ideologies’ underlying language shift in Papua New Guinea, as local communities are absorbed into a larger polity, while Milroy 2004 adds an ideological component to variationist accounts of language change.
Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs. 2003. Voices of modernity: Language ideologies and the politics of inequality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511486647Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Locates the rise of ideas about “modernity” in 17th- and 18th-century works about language, especially the language of scientific and literary analysis. The authors argue that these language-based concepts of “modernity” entailed a new kind of inequality between people using new modes of discourse and people using older ones, an inequality perpetuated in early (and later) philology and anthropology.
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French, Brigittine. 2003. The politics of Mayan linguistics in Guatemala: Native speakers, expert analysts, and the nation. Pragmatics 13:483–498.
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Missionary linguists, professional linguists, and indigenous linguists have had different agendas in undertaking linguistic description of Guatemalan Mayan language. French explores these ideological projects over many decades, and their consequences for the current state of Mayan linguistics.
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Inoue, Miyako. 2006. Vicarious language: Gender and linguistic modernity in Japan. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Explores the ways ideas about “modernity” in Japan, over the decades, have focused on images of women and their use of language.
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Inoue, Miyako, ed. 2004. Special issue: The history of ideology and the ideology of history.Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14.1.
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A collection of essays exploring historical issues in language ideology, relating ideologies of language to ideologies of history.
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Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. InRegimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Edited by Paul Kroskrity, 35–84. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
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A semiotic model of ideological process is argued with respect to three cases of linguistic change: the Nguni languages of South Africa, the major languages of Senegal, and Macedonian.
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Kulick, Don. 1998. Anger, gender, language shift, and the politics of revelation in a Papua New Guinean village. In Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 87–102. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Describes an ethnographic case from New Guinea to show how discourses on emotion and gender are bound up with ideologies of language. Kulick argues that these links influence linguistic practice and, consequently, language change.
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Milroy, Lesley. 2004. Language ideologies and linguistic change. In Sociolinguistic variation: Critical perspectives. Edited by Carmen Fought, 161–177. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Proposes a framework for incorporating locally constructed language ideologies into variationist accounts of language change.
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Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 23:193–229.
DOI: 10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00013-2Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A highly influential discussion of the dynamics of sociolinguistic relations, focusing on shifts in what linguistic signs are perceived to index.
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Smith-Hefner, Nancy J. 2009. Language shift, gender, and ideologies of modernity in central Java, Indonesia. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19:57–77.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2009.01019.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A discussion of gender in the context of Indonesian ideologies about the “modernity” of the Indonesian language, as opposed to the “traditional” languages such as Javanese.
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