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Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality
Abstract
Language and tradition have long been relegated to the sidelines as scholars have considered the role of politics, science, technology and economics in the making of the modern world. This reading of over two centuries of philosophy, political theory, anthropology, folklore and history argues that new ways of imagining language and representing supposedly premodern people - the poor, labourers, country folk, non-europeans and women - made political and scientific revolutions possible. The connections between language ideologies, privileged linguistic codes, and political concepts and practices shape the diverse ways we perceive ourselves and others. This 2003 book demonstrates that contemporary efforts to make schemes of social inequality based on race, gender, class and nationality seem compelling and legitimate, rely on deeply-rooted ideas about language and tradition. Showing how critics of modernity unwittingly reproduce these foundational fictions, it suggests strategies for challenging the undemocratic influence of these voices of modernity.
... In presenting this argument, I run the risk of committing epistemological heresy in suggesting that a theory that helped launch the empirical study of the relationship between political economy and population rests on such "immaterial" phenomena as conceptions of language, rhetoric, and mind. Work that I have conducted in collaboration with Richard Bauman suggests, however, that this implicit inclusion of immaterial assumptions in categories of the real has been a basic feature of modern thinking since the seventeenth century (Bauman and Briggs 1998). We link explicit ideologies of discourse-of language, speech, communication, text and intertextuality, and the like-to practices that centre on controlling the production, circulation, reception, and legitimisation of discourse, which we refer to as metadiscursive practices. ...
... Rather than reflecting on nature per se, mental exertion must lead to that sine qua non of abstract, decontextualised, ahistorical, universal knowledge, the laws of nature; these constitute, in Malthus's view, "the foundation of the faculty of reason" (205). Misery and want only provide routes to knowledge once the path to nature is mediated by the scientific epistemology outlined by Bacon and systematised by Robert Boyle and his fellow Fellows of the Royal Society and embodied in practices that centre on isolating from nature-or one might say constructing-elements, principles, and processes, decontextualising them from the specific circumstances in which they are encountered and construing them as abstract and universal phenomena, and developing a formal language for describing them (see Bauman and Briggs 1998;Hall 1963;Shapin 1994;Shapin and Schaffer 1985). ...
... Without naming Godwin in particular, Malthus sexualises attempts to hide the realities of population pressure with illusory schemes for improving society: "The most baleful mischiefs may be expected from the unmanly conduct of not daring to face truth because it is unpleasing" (199). Here Malthus seems to reflect the way that Bacon and others construct science as masculine and virile, while rhetoric, like nature, is construed as female and passive (see Bauman and Briggs 1998;Keller 1985;Merchant 1980). Pursuing flights of Prepared for the Seminar on Social Categories in Population Health, organised by the Committee on Anthropological Demography of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, 15-18 September 1999, Cairo, Egypt. ...
Throughout its history as a social science discipline, demography has been associated with an exclusively quantitative orientation for studying population problems. An important outcome of this is that demographers tend to analyse population issues scientifically through sets of fixed social categories that are divorced from their embeddedness in dynamic relationships and in varied local contexts and processes. The collection of essays in this volume questions these fixed categories in two ways: firstly, by examining the historical and political circumstances in which such categories have their provenance, and secondly, in reassessing their uncritical applications over space and time in a diverse range of empirical case studies. Reflexive questioning is achieved by encouraging a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue involving anthropologists, demographers, historians, and sociologists.
This volume seeks to examine the political complexities that lie at the heart of population studies, through a focus on category formation, category use, and category critique. It is shown that this takes the form of a dialectic between the needs for clarity of scientific and administrative analysis and the recalcitrant diversity of the social contexts and human processes that generate population change. The critical reflections on the established categories in each of the essays included here are enriched by meticulous ethnographic fieldwork and historical, archival research, drawn from all the continents. The essays collected here, therefore, exemplify a new methodology for research in population studies, which does not simply accept and use the established categories of population science, but seeks critically and reflexively to explore, test, and re‐evaluate their meanings in diverse contexts. The essays show that for demography to realise its full potential, there is an urgent need to re‐examine and contextualise the social categories used today in population research.
... Liberal multicultural settler colonial projects ignore the violence of settlement: they equalize "conflicts" and "claims" with "both sides" approaches and call for inclusion within the hierarchies of settler colonial societies. Like other practices of naturalization and acceptance of existing hierarchies as natural, neutral, and inevitable (Bauman & Briggs, 2003), liberal multicultural settler approaches to research focus on secondary issues that develop as a result of settlement, rather than in the ongoing violence of settler structures themselves. ...
... The multi-sited place project responds to calls by researchers in settler colonial and Indigenous studies who highlight the need for place-based research (Basso, 1996;Tuck & McKenzie, 2015b). The specificity of place in relation to its history and politics, its In this project, the concept of place is held as both Indigenous Land and the settler colonial structures and narratives that erase it, as well as real and imagined geographic locations that signify measures of humanity according to the racializing project of modernity (O'Brien, 2010;Bauman & Briggs, 2003). Further, following Tuck and McKenzie (2015a), I use the concept of "place" in reference to Cedarville due to its conflation with the "local, traditional, and nostalgic," and importantly, its "specificity." ...
This paper argues for a methodological approach, a multi-sited place project, to center place within ethnographies of schooling and facilitate deeper understandings of socialization into settler relations stemming from and supporting the white settler nation-state. This approach draws upon language socialization and critical place inquiry, tracing settler colonial narratives between schools and local history sites such as California missions, historic city walking tours, and township festivals. The multi-sited place project reveals emplaced narratives, stories that socialize people to particular relations and logics to and within specific places, connecting histories and identities to a particular place in the present, and in the process, shaping possibilities of who people can be in the future. Compelling this approach is a desire for greater understandings of incompatibilities within racialized peoples’ work towards liberation on Indigenous lands that are not our own. Its purpose is to bring together approaches for studies of schooling and place in ways that challenge rather than accept settler futures. A multi-sited place project carried out on unceded Ohlone territory illustrates the approach, advancing understandings of how “Latinx” youth and families, primarily of Mexican origin, were socialized into Californian settler histories and identities via a family day at a historic rancho.
... 166). Official language planners in Eurocentric cultural contexts, aside from favoring standard languages and insisting on monolingualism through processes in which "(s)tates and their ruling elites attempted to enforce monolingualism among their citizens through linguistic standardization (…) by valorizing 'authenticity' on the one hand and 'rational universality' on the other" (Gal, 2011, p. 34), have for the longest time insisted on the creation of top-down FL education policies based on centuries-old concepts of European modernity (see Filipović, 2015a, b, c;Bauman & Briggs, 2003, among others, for further discussion). Consequently, only a small number of languages that are politically, socially, and historically dominant in certain geopolitical regions show up as FLs in formal educational systems: the concept of plurilingualism in education and communication (as proposed by the Council of Europe in different editions of the Framework 7 ) remains an idealistic construct in many European societies as long as issues related to the political and socioeconomic power of languages are not recognized and seriously taken into account (Filipović, 2018: 163), as … language teaching is "generally the quest for power that enters into the equation whether people demand to learn a language or whether some powerful entity, such as the state, makes policies to teach it" (Rahman, 2001, p. 56). ...
... 170-176). The failure to assure quality and sustainable instruction of these two languages can be interpreted as one of the consequences of striving for the "nation-state-language Holy Trinity" (Bugarski, 2005(Bugarski, , 2009) typical of European newly founded nation-states and the spread of the language ideology of modernity (Filipović, 2015a, b, c;Bauman & Briggs, 2003), which disfavors regional and minority languages and creates a significantly privileged space for languages of politically and culturally dominant but geographically relatively distant countries (Djurić, 2016, p. 111). ...
The earliest history of Chinese communities in Oceania can be traced back to Australia in the mid-1800s. Recent years has seen rapid growth in the number of Mandarin Chinese speakers as a consequence of the patterns of migration to the Oceania region, particularly Australia and New Zealand. Mandarin Chinese (hereafter Mandarin) has gradually become integrated into formal and informal education in both countries. The governments of Australia and New Zealand consider Mandarin a significant language for their youth because of the economic and cultural ties with the Chinese-speaking world. Employing Kaplan and Baldauf's (Language-in-education policy and planning. In Hinkel E (ed) Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp 1013--1034, 2005) framework in language-in-education planning, this chapter summarises both countries' national education systems and examines the importance of Mandarin in the curricula in Australia and New Zealand. It is apparent that community-level policy has somehow reinforced the introduction of Mandarin in complementary and mainstream education. To promote early Mandarin learning, key educational stakeholders or actors have been involved, and each plays a key role, particularly in mesolevel planning. This chapter concludes with considerations for sustaining policy development for all language learners. It is argued that early language learning should foster intercultural understanding and awareness in order to maintain a long-term interest in learning and develop multilingual repertoires in both countries.
... After all, the arguments motivating the need for emancipation from this cultural metafiction have been around for at least half a centurynot only in Love's influential publications, of course, or indeed in the publications of Love's late mentor, Roy Harris (1981Harris ( , 1982Harris ( , 1987 and of the many scholars influenced by Harris, but also in the writings of many other scholars (cf. Baumann and Briggs, 2003;Agha, 2007b;Linell, 2005). These arguments have been expressed often and motivated in a variety of ways. ...
... For, on the one hand, we would be repeating the error of the metafiction's intellectualism if, abstracting away from their contingent circumstances and normative grammars, we were to construe (to reentextualize) lay metalinguistic remarks as 'folk', junior-scientific versions of the questions, hypotheses, and assertions at play within the grammar of the language-games of language-scientific discourse (cf. Taylor, 1992;Baumann and Briggs, 2003). On the other hand, we risk repeating the error of the metafiction's representationalism (surrogationalism) ifdby introducing elements of the explanans into the explanandum itselfdwe construe the expressions we find in either 'lay' or 'expert' metadiscourse as verbally-instantiated representations of underlying or second-order 'somethings': whether abstractions, constructs, concepts, attractors, mental states, virtual objects, etc. (cf. ...
In his influential critiques of the theoretical foundations of the language sciences, Nigel Love claims that modern linguistics is based on “a cultural metafiction” and that it must “emancipate itself from what is no more than a profoundly important but nonetheless culturally parochial way of construing linguistic phenomena.” This paper reviews Love's account of the historical sources and modern consequences of this cultural metafiction and asks why it is so frustratingly difficult to emancipate the language sciences from the epistemological presuppositions of this ethnocentric metafiction. In addressing these questions, the paper explores the accountability of the expert metalinguistic discourse of the language sciences to the normative rhetoric of lay metalinguistic practices – or, in Wittgenstein's distinctive use of the term, to the ‘grammar’ of those practices.
... ies the reality of an empirically verifiable, codified standard, and even written English, to which a standard can be said to apply more appropriately, shows much variation (Biber, 1988). Why then does a belief in a standard persist, and why is it so widespread among speakers, even among those who admittedly do not speak according to its ''rules?'' Bauman and Briggs (2003) argue persuasively that such thinking is deeply embedded in our social, cultural, political, and linguistic history and that it is not due to a single language ideology. Instead they identify ''a shifting and dynamic juxtaposition of contradictory but widely accepted practices of purification and hybridization that has proven very power ...
... Key here were hybridizing processes between language and society that linked standard speech with education, rationality and higher social class, and vernacular speech with lack of modern education, lower social class and irrationality that threatened the economic and political order. This historical analysis of the ideological processes that have formed deeply held attitudes toward language and society certainly explain the intensity of public controversies that erupted around Ebonics and the Oakland Board of Education in 1996 and the English-only movement of recent decades in the U.S. (Bauman and Briggs, 2003:303–305). Linguists' claims of the patterned nature (the ''purism'') of vernacular language varieties confront deeply held beliefs that only standard languages are systematically organized, ''pure,'' effectively communicative, and appropriate for the public sphere. ...
Plurilingual language practices in Chicago are examined using the notions of linguistic markets and language ideologies. Plurilingualism encompasses bi/multilingualism and bidialectalism, or both, in dynamic use. Chicago always was and is plurilingual; traders speaking Haitian Creole, French, and English confronted speakers of indigenous Checagou languages in the late 18th century, and the enormous 19th century migration brought German and other European languages. 20th century migration brought Asian and other world languages and, notably, Spanish. Ethnographic research in homes, workplaces, schools, and religious organizations illustrates vibrant contemporary plurilingualism. Both historical and contemporary plurilingualism are embedded in a larger context of competing language ideologies that explain the persistence of plurilingual practices and the ambivalent history of official language policy in Illinois. Although dominant ideologies valorize a monoglot standard English, plurilingual practices evidence a persistent valuing of non-(standard) English language. For example, the official language policy of the Chicago Public Schools promotes (standard) English at the expense of students’ community languages, whereas the grass-roots Multilingual Chicago Initiative promotes Chicago's plurilingualism. Dominant ideologies that link a codified “standard” with modernity, clarity and rationality and vernacular varieties with lack of education and irrationality explain the former, whereas local linguistic markets explain the latter.
... The paper draws on approaches from linguistic anthropology that have critiqued the modernist aspects of early anthropology, and its associated language ideologies (e.g. Briggs & Bauman, 2003, Moore 2006. Examining the cultural and political consequences of the discursive division of Nahuatl into "Classical" and "Modern", I argue that Boas' promotion of interest in Modern Nahuatl and his use of the word "classical" to refer to the colonial documentary variety, had significant consequences for Mexican Indigenous politics, and for Nahua people. ...
This paper explores the process through which the indigenous Nahuatl language came to be thought of as being divided into "Classical" and "Modern" forms. The origin of Modern Nahuatl as a concept is traced to the modernizing project of Franz Boas, who interacted with several of the central Nahuatl scholars in Mexico in the tumultuous decade from 1910-1920. In 1917 Boas published the first grammatical description of a "Modern Nahuatl" variety, and through the efforts of the International Field School in Archeology and Ethnology he motivated a series of similar studies by US and Mexican scholars, including Benjamin Lee Whorf, Robert Barlow, Isabel Ramirez Castaneda, and Pablo Gonzales Casanova. The paper draws on approaches from linguistic anthropology that have critiqued the modernist aspects of early anthropology, and its associated language ideologies (e.g. Briggs & Bauman, 2003, Moore 2006). Examining the cultural and political consequences of the discursive division of Nahuatl into "Classical" and "Modern", I argue that Boas' promotion of interest in Modern Nahuatl and his use of the word "classical" to refer to the colonial documentary variety, had significant consequences for Mexican Indigenous politics, and for Nahua people. The case of "Modern Nahuatl" presents an important example of how the ways in which we as scholars relate to the past, and how we connect it to their own present, may turn out to have significant role in producing the future. The Nahuatl language of Mexico is doubtless one of the most thoroughly described languages of the Americas, having been the medium for a vibrant culture of writing and scholarship in the colonial period. But the language label masks a considerable diversity across time and space that is not always recognized, or which when it is, is usually recognized only partially. The first anthropologist to bring the diversity of Nahuatl to the attention of the academic community was Franz Boas, who in doing so introduced a distinction between the well-known variety of the colonial sources which, and the varieties spoken across central Mexico in the early 20 th century. This distinction between "classical Nahuatl", the term most often used for the colonial written variety, and "modern Nahuatl", a catch-all term for the range of regional dialectal varieties spoken in Mexico in the 20 th and 21 st century, remains the most common way of conceptualizing and describing the diversity of Nahuatl today. In this paper, I describe Boas' role as a founding figure in the study of Nahuatl as a living language, and I describe some of the glottopolitical consequences of his construal of the division between "classic" and "modern" Nahuatl.
... Finally, an understanding of translanguaging allows teachers to consider the multiple power dynamics at play within the classroom where bi/multilingual students are present (Bauman & Briggs, 2003;García & Otheguy, 2020). That is, teachers have the power to sanction what is considered appropriate language for learning and expressing one's learning. ...
A high school English teacher/doctoral student and two university researchers share a three-part framework for educating emergent bilinguals across disciplines with these constructs: language, literacy, and love. Through long-term professional development, teachers at two high schools began to view language as translanguaging, literacy as multiliteracies, and love as the critical notion of armed love. Specifically, as educators recognized the value of students' home languages, they understood how all languaging was useful to acquire English, access content, and develop confidence in disciplinary literacy. Building off an understanding of students' languaging, educators then focused on multiliteracies in their disciplines, incorporating multilingual and multimodal literature in their curriculum that represented student diversity. Finally, teaching through a critical lens of armed love, educators began to examine societal, political, and economical constructs relevant to their emergent bilinguals' lives. This framework is useful to effect sustainable changes for teaching and learning equity with students in the dynamic process of English language acquisition. Phyliciá Anderson has taught high school English language arts, photojournalism, and creative writing for ten years. She is a Ph.D. student in Reading Education at Texas Woman's University where she researches culturally responsive pedagogy, critical literacy, multilingual education, multimodality, and discourse. She has published a book chapter and peer-reviewed articles, presented at conferences locally, nationally and internationally, and produced manuscripts currently out for review.
... The ideology of English as a mark of elitism that co-exists with Bangla, as two separate organic bodies, is anchored in the ideological framework of modern nationalism and the associated one-nation-one-culture-one-language slogan (Anderson 1983;Billig 1995;Bauman and Briggs 2003). As Bangladesh sought independence from Pakistan drawing on post-colonial nationalism, the European idea that links one culture to one language as well as the political significance of a language for claiming territory, nationhood and sovereignty (Gal and Irvine 1995: 1) became instrumental and thus shaped the national identity of the land of Bangla as Bangladesh, particularly in 1971. ...
This thesis focuses on the impact of global capitalism on women’s empowerment programmes in higher education in Bangladesh. The topic has warranted a nuanced attention ever since world organisations and philanthropic foundations have directed their attention to women in so called developing countries to accelerate economic growth. Drawing on a sociolinguistic ethnographic approach, I investigate the trajectories of empowerment of three women from socio-economically underserved backgrounds studying at the focal university which endeavours to empower women and produce future leaders by offering leadership skills and English language as part of a liberal arts education. In so doing, I adopt Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and subjectivation with the aim of illuminating the tensions between a moral obligation to transform and the promise of social mobility. Through an analysis of stance-taking and affect as communicative social practices in daily interactions and narrations, I demonstrate how the women come to understand that learning English and developing leadership skills entail working on themselves to become desired. I argue that the women’s construction of ‘becoming empowered’ shapes and is shaped by the discourses of women’s empowerment they are engaging with, sometimes showing alignment and sometimes contestation. My study of their trajectories also details an interplay of capitalist logic and inequalities of class, patriarchy and coloniality which complexly shape their subjectivities. The thesis documents what drives these women to pursue a neoliberalised education system with English as the language of promise despite the struggles and the precarity of such a system; more than their internalisation of neoliberal values it is their desperation to liberate themselves from a life of deprivation and discrimination which they hope a transformation into a neoliberal corporate self-hood would engender.
... Ramsoedh (2013) observes that in present-day Suriname, the celebration and acceptance of cultural diversity is an important ingredient of current nation formation processes. This 'unity in diversity' attitude diverges from most European contexts, where nation formation has generally been dominated by the one-na tion-one-(standard)-language-ideal (Bauman and Briggs, 2003). As a consequence, in these European contexts, exclusionary standard language ideologies have emerged in which languages are clearly hierarchized in terms of prestige and solidarity. ...
This paper reports a large-scale survey into the language attitudes of 485 participants from the Surinamese capital Paramaribo. Suriname is an interesting arena for standard language research, as the country is steeped in multilingualism but regards the Dutch of its former colonizer as its only official language. We elicited evaluations of 10 languages spoken in Suriname in response to label- and audio-based stimuli. Responses were enriched with valence information (pertaining to their positive/negative character), and subjected to qualitative scrutiny and regression analysis. Theoretically, our findings indicate that Suriname is embracing the endonormative development of a Surinamese variety of Dutch, which is becoming an obvious and uncontested practical norm variety. American English is also deemed prestigious, but its superiority perceptions pertain for the most part to a (desired) ideological status rather than to any suitability as a practical lingua franca. Sranan, finally, is valued as a solidarity standard, but it lacks the prestige correlates which are a prerequisite for standard status. Methodologically, this paper demonstrates that harvesting language attitudes in multi-ethnic, multilingual societies necessitates an exploratory attitude, a ‘wide net’, and a concomitantly large toolbox of experimental techniques.
... Ramsoedh (2013) observes that in present-day Suriname, the celebration and acceptance of cultural diversity is an important ingredient of current nation formation processes. This 'unity in diversity' attitude diverges from most European contexts, where nation formation has generally been dominated by the one-na tion-one-(standard)-language-ideal (Bauman and Briggs, 2003). As a consequence, in these European contexts, exclusionary standard language ideologies have emerged in which languages are clearly hierarchized in terms of prestige and solidarity. ...
This paper reports a large-scale survey into the language attitudes of 485 participants from the Surinamese capital Paramaribo. Suriname is an interesting arena for standard language research, as the country is steeped in multilingualism but regards the Dutch of its former colonizer as its only official language. We elicited evaluations of 10 languages spoken in Suriname in response to label- and audio-based stimuli. Responses were enriched with valence information (pertaining to their positive/negative character), and subjected to qualitative scrutiny and regression analysis. Theoretically, our findings indicate that Suriname is embracing the endonormative development of a Surinamese variety of Dutch, which is becoming an obvious and uncontested practical norm variety. American English is also deemed prestigious, but its superiority perceptions pertain for the most part to a (desired) ideological status rather than to any suitability as a practical lingua franca. Sranan, finally, is valued as a solidarity standard, but it lacks the prestige correlates which are a prerequisite for standard status. Methodologically, this paper demonstrates that harvesting language attitudes in multi-ethnic, multilingual societies necessitates an exploratory attitude, a ‘wide net’, and a concomitantly large toolbox of experimental techniques.
... Port (2007) maintained: "It is now difficult to think about spoken language in any other way than in terms of its serially ordered alphabetical form" and further explained part of the appeal of alphabetical thinking:"Understanding complex dynamical events with many degrees of freedom (e.g., an economic system, an ecological system or the speech production process) without visual or spatial scaffolding remains very difficult"(both quotes p.155). The still life of most transcripts encourages an analytical view of language, presumed to be the same the world over, having certain preordained components and marked off from a less than ideal reality:"The notion of a universal linguistic framework, as defined by phonetic, lexical, and grammatical commonalities, is based on the idea that language can be neatly separated from that which is non-linguistic, supposedly including culture and society" (Bauman & Briggs (2003):266). Inducements to transcribe reflect many purposes and therefore transcripts exhibit a "variability [that] is inherent in all language use" (Bucholtz (2007):785), but they also entail, explicitly or not, a concatenation of ideas about language and thus:"Inasmuch as transcription necessitates the development of a new way of representing speech, it is a prototypical instance of language making"(Himmelmann (2018):37). ...
This is a modest experiment in imaging language as an interactional craft, that ranges over reflexivity, interaction, transcription, contact languages, language diversity, information theory, and languaging.
... Schools have always insisted on developing "language" as if this was a system of linguistic structures disconnected from the lives of people. But as many scholars have argued (Bauman & Briggs, 2003;Makoni & Pennycook, 2007), this "language" now taught and considered the key to educational success was constructed, and it is the effect of colonization and nation-building. Borderland maestrxs understand this best because the violent encounter with Europeans is very much a part of their own consciousness. ...
A Participatory Design Research (PDR) conducted with fifteen Chicana dual language bilingual teachers in New Mexico focused on expanding their understandings of their own translanguaging, so as to transform their concept of biliteracy and design their biliteracy instruction as a site for resistance and transformation of bilingual marginalized students. After reviewing how translanguaging shapes understandings of biliteracy, and describing the intervention done with the teachers, one teacher’s emerging transformative stance towards biliteracy is highlighted, as she co-designs a borderland biliteracy unit within her Spanish Language Arts curriculum. The article shows how this teacher’s instructional design impacts the students’ biliterate learning by highlighting the work and writing of one student.
Keywords: biliteracy, bilingualism, New Mexico, Chicanx, dual language bilingual education, Southwest, translanguaging
... I tailored the essay in such a way that it addresses several of Sjaak's interests, overlapping with mine. I am grateful to Ico Maly for critical comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the paper. of the Chomskyan paradigm in linguistics, and to emphasize continuity with an older paradigm incorporated in anthropology and exemplified in the tradition started by Franz Boas (Darnell, 1998;Hymes, 1992Hymes, , 1996Bauman & Briggs, 2003). It is in this longer tradition that the two connected issues were given a definitive shape. ...
This edited volume consists of chapters celebrating the career of scholar Sjaak Kroon, who has produced ground-breaking work in the field of ethnography of education, immigrant minority language teaching and language politics. The chapters cover the use of immigrant minority languages in education and the development of policies at all levels and across the globe in this sometimes over-policed field. It particularly focuses on language policy analysis in which both the top-down institutional and the bottom-up ethnographic dimensions are blended, and in which globalization is the main macro-perspective. The chapters describe sensitive tools for investigating, unravelling and understanding the grey space connecting formal language policies to informal politics and practices of language on the ground.
... The construction of metadiscursive regimes of discourse by linguists to describe and categorize languages can be seen to create the objects of their own analysis (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). The creation of the separated named languages, often bound to geographical locations, can be seen to have emerged with the rise of the modern nation state (Baumann & Briggs, 2003) and the spread of capitalism (O'Regan, 2021), which proved an effective way to consolidate and control domestic populations as well as establish global hierarchies, with English at the top. In this way, languages can be seen as deliberate constructs, rather than objective category types. ...
The recent epistemological shift in applied linguistics to a more postmodern orientation, which celebrates and embraces the mobility and diversity of languages, has fundamentally influenced the way languages are perceived and examined in both pedagogy and research (Pennycook, 2010). Accordingly, second and foreign language teaching has also turned its focus to more fluid, dynamic, and multitudinous entities (Canagarajah, 2013). However, such a drastic shift has not yet filtered through to how academic writing is taught in the classroom.
In EFL writing classrooms, academic writing is still predominantly occupied with monolingual discourses where English is regarded as the only language that students are allowed to utilize in writing. In addition, the pedagogy of academic writing is imbued with native-speakerist ideologies where Western writing conventions are normalized. In such learning environments, emergent multilingual students do not seem to have sufficient spaces to negotiate and engage with translingual practice in their literacy acquisition. In this chapter, we first critique current practices concerning the teaching of academic writing. Then, we make an experimental proposal for a de-nativized, translingual approach to academic writing which empowers students who bring multilingual identities and resources into the classroom, with a particular emphasis on the Japanese context.
... Language and the Singularity of the Colonial Difference Bauman and Briggs (2003) have shown how since the 17th century, theories of language as a structured entity (Park and Wee 2012) have operated as an instrument of colonialism and nation-building to produce and naturalize forms of social inequality and construct modernity. That is, the ideological invention of language by European elites has resulted not only in the imposition of rigid forms of using language that reflect their own, but also in branding those whose language practices are different as intellectually inferior and even dangerous. ...
This open access book is designed as an international anthology on the broader subject of inclusion, education, social justice and translanguaging. Prefaced by Ofelia García, the volume unites conceptional and empirical contributions focusing on various actors within educational institutions, from early childhood to secondary education and teacher training, while offering insights into multiple European and North-American educational systems.
Contents
• Translanguaging in Early Childhood Education
• Translanguaging in School Education
• Translanguaging from the Perspective of (Multilingual) Students, Teachers and Educators
Target Groups
Researchers and students in the fields of educational, social and political sciences
Editors
Professor Dr. Julie A. Panagiotopoulou, University of Cologne
Professor Dr. Lisa Rosen, University of Cologne
M.A. Jenna Strzykala, University of Cologne
... (Bauman e Briggs, 2003). Tal visão, encapsulada por uma retórica de distanciamento crítico, ainda é surpreendentemente imperiosa na modernidade em transição que vivemos atualmente -processo tributário dos sulcos que o positivismo marcou na vida social e na produção do conhecimento no ocidente. ...
Este artigo defende a necessidade de proximidade crítica em Linguística Aplicada com base na desconstrução de uma episteme ocidentalista que separa pesquisa, pesquisador e poder. Tal crença nos levou à prefiguração de um pesquisador branco, heterossexual, e masculino, construtor de ‘verdades científicas’. Na modernidade em transição em que nos situamos, esses ideais são perturbados tendo em vista as mudanças e perplexidades sociais que nos desafiam cotidianamente e que destronam os modos tradicionais de produzir conhecimento. Argumentamos a favor da importância do questionamento de ideologias linguísticas e epistemológicas comprometidas com qualquer significado de transparência teórica. Ao concluir, apresentamos a imaginação utópica como um exercício epistemológico de proximidade crítica que é central em face de seus possíveis ganhos transgressivos.Palavras-chave: proximidade crítica; modernidade em transição; imaginação epistemológica.
... Who knew? That decision, made in the interests of saving time and effort, grew into a number of articles and a 16-year-long book project, culminating in Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Production of Social Inequality (Bauman & Briggs 2003). The years since those two turning points-essentially the latter half of my career-were shaped by the smoothly convergent intellectual engagements I shared with Charles and my colleagues at the Center and in Michicagoan. ...
Starting from a recent flash of reflexive illumination experienced as a member of a dissertation committee, this act of (re-)constructive retrospection recalls the principal forces, experiences, and individuals that shaped my career as a linguistic anthropologist and turned my interests toward poetics, performance, language ideology, and remediation. Retracingmysteps-sometimes halting, sometimes headlong-along the winding path that I have followed makes clear the degree to which my career has depended on the generous and energizing influence of my mentors, teachers, and colleagues, but also on the frustrating roadblocks placed in my way by less generous and understanding figures that led me to turn toward what proved to be far more productive directions. This reflexive process has also made clearer to me than ever before how strongly my career has been affected by the shifting conditions imposed by the political economy of higher education as I made my way in academe.
... The story I want to tell in this essay is how this mid-twentieth-century rebellion against the confines of theoretical linguistics went on to blossom into a powerful intellectual nexus, with folklorists and the expressive forms we favor playing a central role in this far-reaching treatment of the social uses of language. We can seek roots for this twentieth-century florescence in adumbrations of earlier decades and centuries ( Malinowski 1923;Boas 1925;Bauman and Briggs 2003), but my intent here is to trace the more immediate sources of inspiration as I identify insights emerging in the 1960s and 1970s that continue to inform and guide research on language in culture. The focus of this essay is on the multi-layered relationship between folkloristics and sociolinguistics, resulting in a strong sociolinguistic influence on folklore studies, and, equally, a significant folkloristic contribution to sociolinguistics; I will argue, in particular, that folklorists engaging in this project open a perspective on the intersection of poetic elaboration and rhetorical impact. ...
Folklore and sociolinguistics exist in a symbiotic relationship; more than that, at points—in the ethnography of communication and in ethnopoetics, for example—they overlap and become indistinguishable. As part of a reaction to the formal rigor and social detachment of Chomsky’s theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics emerges in the mid-twentieth century to assess the role of language in social life. Folklorists join the cause and bring to it a commitment to in-depth ethnography and a longstanding engagement with artistic communication. In this essay, I trace key phases in the development of this interdisciplinary movement, revolutionary in its reorientation of language study to the messy but fascinating realm of speech usage. I offer the concept of performative efficacy, the notion that expressive culture performances have the capacity to shape attitude and action and thereby transform perceived realities, as a means of capturing the continuing promise of a sociolinguistically informed folkloristics.
... Some authors, although not using the word conviviality per se, are actually describing very similar phenomena to the ones explained above. Bauman's "modus conviviendi" refers to how people accommodate one another in the everyday business of living together and what contextual features, projects and everyday tactics are involved in shaping these relationships [26]. Marcus and Francis use the expression 'street democracy' to describe those streets that have meaning for people, that invite access for all, and encourage use and participation. ...
Particularly in Europe, which has long struggled to accept a diversifying population, urban neighbourhoods are increasingly heterogeneous. Change is accelerating as the crisis in the Middle East drives refugees to European cities. This current diversification has tremendous implications for the ways people use urban public places. The typology of the people’s park is one of the contexts where this will play out. The people’s park, characterized by an intent to design spaces for and with all members of a community, is an everyday space with potential to promote social well-being. In this research conviviality is understood as a social condition contributing to everyday quality of life. In defining conviviality, we have gone beyond the English definition, “to live together and/or dine together,” incorporating other meanings such as the French, “ability of a society to promote tolerance and mutual exchange of ideas among the people and groups that compose it.” Our research examines the people’s park as an institution for fostering convivial behaviour in public life. The ultimate goal of this research is to inform urban planning policies addressing social life in the public realm, with a focus on peacebuilding and conflict prevention in multi-ethnic communities. The means to that goal is the development of a methodology for studying the relationship between design and convivial behaviour, that can guide the design of parks to promote peaceful coexistence and can assist communities in assessing and improving existing underperforming parks. The objective of this paper is to trace the development of the research methodology from the main findings of the literature review of conviviality in the urban realm.
... Language socialization-inspired linguistic ethnography, in particular, has played an important role in illuminating the intricate relationship among multilingual language practices, immigrant children and youth, and larger sociocultural dynamics, with particular emphasis on how these domains intersect with the hegemonic language ideologies and cultural politics of recognition and belonging that immigrants must negotiate on a daily basis. This chapter traces the major contributions of 1 For an exhaustive historical examination of how notions of belonging to European national collectivities became tied to ideas of ethnolinguistic purity, see Bauman and Briggs' (2003) Voices of Modernity, particularly Chaps. 5 and 6. this research paradigm to current understandings of how processes of language and sociocultural development unfold in politically contested contexts of immigration and, in turn, how they impact immigrant children's and youth's sense of belonging and processes of identification. ...
Language socialization-inspired linguistic ethnography, by focusing on the complex relationship between multilingual practices and larger sociocultural dynamics to illuminate the experience of immigrant communities in Europe, has enriched current understandings of new sociopolitical European realities – characterized by mobility, multilingualism, and diversity. This review emphasizes children’s and youth’s everyday and institutionalized language practices, as they intersect with hegemonic language ideologies, and cultural politics of recognition and belonging that immigrants must negotiate on a daily basis. This chapter first traces early developments by describing how language socialization theory was used to explore the complex dialectic among language use, identity development, and group belonging in the socialization trajectories of immigrant children and youth. The main section concentrates on the most productive analytic foci in this body of literature, more specifically immigrant children’s and youth’s linguistic and interactional practices as they negotiate identities in relation to difference and belonging; school interactions as key sites for the socialization of newcomers amid crisscrossing tensions and debates about integration, education, and inclusion; and intergenerational dynamics and religious socialization in the development of heritage identities. The final section outlines several lines of inquiry for future language socialization studies in European immigrant communities, namely, paying closer attention to how structural inequalities and power relationships shape processes of language socialization in contexts of sociopolitical marginalization, attending to adult language socialization processes as they impact professional and bureaucratic trajectories, and investigating the kinds of socialization trajectories of multilingual development that are encouraged in European transnational spaces and institutions.
... Language socialization-inspired linguistic ethnography, in particular, has played an important role in illuminating the intricate relationship among multilingual language practices, immigrant children and youth, and larger sociocultural dynamics, with particular emphasis on how these domains intersect with the hegemonic language ideologies and cultural politics of recognition and belonging that immigrants must negotiate on a daily basis. This chapter traces the major contributions of 1 For an exhaustive historical examination of how notions of belonging to European national collectivities became tied to ideas of ethnolinguistic purity, see Bauman and Briggs' (2003) Voices of Modernity, particularly Chaps. 5 and 6. this research paradigm to current understandings of how processes of language and sociocultural development unfold in politically contested contexts of immigration and, in turn, how they impact immigrant children's and youth's sense of belonging and processes of identification. ...
Language socialization-inspired linguistic ethnography, by focusing on the complex relationship between multilingual practices and larger sociocultural dynamics to illuminate the experience of immigrant communities in Europe, has enriched current understandings of new sociopolitical European realities – characterized by mobility, multilingualism, and diversity. This review emphasizes children’s and youth’s everyday and institutionalized language practices, as they intersect with hegemonic language ideologies, and cultural politics of recognition and belonging that immigrants must negotiate on a daily basis. This chapter first traces early developments by describing how language socialization theory was used to explore the complex dialectic among language use, identity development, and group belonging in the socialization trajectories of immigrant children and youth. The main section concentrates on the most productive analytic foci in this body of literature, more specifically immigrant children’s and youth’s linguistic and interactional practices as they negotiate identities in relation to difference and belonging; school interactions as key sites for the socialization of newcomers amid crisscrossing tensions and debates about integration, education, and inclusion; and intergenerational dynamics and religious socialization in the development of heritage identities. The final section outlines several lines of inquiry for future language socialization studies in European immigrant communities, namely, paying closer attention to how structural inequalities and power relationships shape processes of language socialization in contexts of sociopolitical marginalization, attending to adult language socialization processes as they impact professional and bureaucratic trajectories, and investigating the kinds of socialization trajectories of multilingual development that are encouraged in European transnational spaces and institutions.
... Glottonyms such as "K'ichee'" or "Kaqchikel" were introduced by the Spanish to unify mutually intelligible regional varieties under one name. 1 The introduction of mutual intelligibility as diagnostic criterion responds to western language ideologies rather than to Mesoamerican practice (Woolard, 1994;Bauman and Briggs, 2003;Romero, 2015). Loyalty to one's ethnic identity often leads to resistance to "neutral" standardized forms or to forms emblematic of other ethnic communities. ...
Based on the study of the recent development of the K'iche' Facebook platform and Microsoft Windows' K'iche' version, I discuss the conflict between Western and Maya language ideologies embodied in current translation practices in Guatemala. International corporations prefer hiring individual translators and consultants and avoid engaging the indigenous institutions charged with standardization and linguistic revitalization. The lack of community sanction for local corporate proxies leads to contestation of the translators' credentials and provokes community turmoil. It also highlights opposed community views of globalization and OF the best strategies to cope with the challenges and opportunities it affords. Finally, I examine the consequences for indigenous language revitalization of the current political economy of social media and corporate software.
... I want to suggest a number of reasons as to why culturalist reasoning needs to be repositioned historically, socially, and politically economically before we project its possible demise. Bauman and Briggs (1999) suggest that representations of customs and worldviews played a crucial role in shaping the forms of social inequality that constituted modernity as early as the seventeenth century, long before modern evolutionary or other forms of biological reasoning gained ascendancy. Similarly, biological and culturalist logics are hardly mutually exclusive in racist discourses; Packard's (1989) demonstration that health-based arguments for Apartheid policies in South Africa moved from a more cultural to a decidedly biological mode of reasoning suggests that comfortable linear narratives that project the displacement of biological by cultural reasoning are dangerously misleading. ...
In Love in Times of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1985) creates a powerful image of Latin American modernity in the character of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Urbino is called back from France, where he has studied medicine and embraced European modernity, in order to save the coastal Colombian city in which he was born from that quintessence of the premodern world of ignorance, filth, and backwardness—cholera. García Márquez captures exquisitely the terror that is conjured up by the disease—thousands of bodies wracked by rivers of diarrhea and vomit, cramps, sunken eyes, blue lips, and twisted limbs, many of them dying rapidly. But Urbino is armed with that quintessence of modernity—hygiene. The terror inspired by the epidemic enables Urbino to transform both the urban landscape and bodily practices in keeping with the dictates of Continental biopower, neatly mediated by his own patrician class standing. Narrativizing cholera terror thus provides a land of tropical romance and decadence with an opening for entering modernity—insofar as its residents accept bodily and social surveillance and regulation. García Márquez's readers will recall, however, that the triumph over cholera is not absolute or irrevocable. After Urbino's death, his widow is united with the man who has loved her since his youth. In the final scene, the aged lovers find a zone that is cut off from time and space as they travel along a river in a boat whose cholera quarantine flag precludes landing in any port, creating a liminal space in which they can culminate a love long repressed. This scene is remarkably prescient. At the time that Love in Times of Cholera was published, the disease had been absent from Latin America for nearly a century. A cholera outbreak began in Peru in January of 1991, however, and Peruvian public health officials had reported 322,562 cases and 2,909 deaths by the end of the year (PAHO
Linguistic anthropology has remained largely unaffected by debates about ontology in other subfields. In turn, the concept of language has been conspicuously absent from ontological debates. The past few years, however, have seen attempts at articulating the two, interrogating what language is from ethnographic perspectives and extending the analytic focus to ontologies of language or linguistic natures. This article discusses such efforts and compares them to previous critical engagements with the concept of language. Calling into question the ontological equivalence of language within and across cultures, communities, and regions, it explores understandings of what language is that go against the grain of existing theoretical models.
In this article, I reflect on the future of macro-sociolinguistic research from a global-south perspective. I discuss the role that activism has played in scholarly work, and how such activism was hampered by persistent ideologies of ‘thingification’; that is, ideologies that created languages and nations as ‘objects’ (to be managed and controlled by states and local/national/global elites). I ground the history of such discourses in colonialism-capitalism. I further explore the global and local regimes of language that were created through the dehumanizing violence of colonialism-capitalism, as well as the alternative futures that have been imagined by all those who resisted – and continue to resist – this violence. I conclude with some thoughts on temporalities, on the different relationships with, and to, time and the urgency of the present.
Conceptualizations of competence that permeate applied linguistics systematically fail to account for the role of racialization in language learning and assessments thereof. To interrogate the racialization of linguistic competence, we first examine its discursive emergence in conjunction with the ideological construction of linguistic homogeneity as central to the naturalization of race within the context of European colonialism. We then track how ideas about linguistic competence took shape jointly with a genre of the human that is overrepresented as white, as well as how this particular genre of the human informed foundational conceptualizations of communicative competence. After analyzing relevant examples of how communicative competence has been taken up in ways that reify this racializing ideology, we end with an alternative conceptualization of the goals of language learning that focuses on the worldviews and lifeways of racialized communities to move beyond universalizing conceptions of competence as the desired outcome. A one‐page Accessible Summary of this article in non‐technical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis‐database.org
Nowadays we witness the invasion of a belligerent culture in different areas of social life, including politics. As right-wing populism spreads worldwide, a close look at the way language has been used by political leaders and their supporters is necessary (HODGES, 2020HODGES, A. (2020). When words Trump politics: resisting a hostile regime of language. California: Stanford University Press.). The same can be said about the linguistic beliefs that guide our interpretations of the forms and uses of languages and our ways of triggering political resistance. In this work, we analyze three tweets that criticize the discursive performances of Abraham Weintraub, former Minister of Education of the government of Jair Bolsonaro, when he violated the standard form of the Portuguese language. We aim to investigate the linguistic ideologies that guide such criticisms, assessing the effects they have on political projects interested in defending the rights of socially marginalized groups. For our analyses, we use iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure (GAL & IRVINE, 2019GAL, S.; IRVINE, J. T. (2019). Signs of difference: language and ideology in social life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) as theoretical-analytical constructs. The results of this study indicate that modes of resistance guided by linguistic ideologies that support a pure ideal of language endorse negative meanings associated with popular linguistic resources and, by extension, with socially excluded groups. We argue in favor of linguistic ideologies that embrace different ways of communicating (PINTO, 2013PINTO, J. P. (2013). Prefiguração identitária e hierarquias linguísticas. In. MOITA LOPES, L. P. (ORG.). Português no século XXI: Cenário Geopolítico e sociolinguístico. São Paulo: Parábola. p. 120-143.; FABRÍCIO & MOITA LOPES, 2019FABRICIO, B. F.; MOITA LOPES, L. P. (2019). Transidiomaticity and transperformances in Brazilian queer rap: toward an abject aesthetics. Gragoatá, [S.l.], v. 24, n. 48, p. 136-159, apr. Disponível em: <https://periodicos.uff.br/gragoata/article/view/33623>. Acesso em: 16 oct. 2020.
https://periodicos.uff.br/gragoata/artic... ) as a possible approach to thinking about practices of political resistance that are, in fact, committed to inclusive and social justice agendas.
Keywords:
linguistic ideology; politics; resistance; mixtures
Sociolinguistic stratification – the fact that language diversity is turned into inequality through processes of normative judgment – has been central in the development of modern sociolinguistics and has kept researchers’ attention for many decades. The online-offline nexus in which we have learned to live and organize our social lives in online as well as offline spaces, each carrying different normative standards, has become a lab for manifest sociolinguistic restratification. An analysis of Donald Trump’s orthographic errors on Twitter, and how such errors went viral, shows how multiple audiences apply very different indexical vectors to the errors, each of them iconicizing a more general set of perceived social and political divisions. The outcome is a complex, polycentric sociolinguistic system, far less stable than that imagined in earlier sociolinguistics. This system requires renewed attention.
This chapter discusses the communicability framework in rethinking three topics that figure significantly in medical anthropology and adjacent fields – narrative, doctor‐patient interaction, and health communication. It explores why health news is of greater importance to medical anthropology than is generally recognized and suggests why its marginalization limits analytic and ethnographic advances. Dominant communicabilities transform the structural effects of unhealthy health policies into seeming failures of knowledge and communication, thereby co‐producing what Paul Farmer calls "pathologies of power." "Doctor‐patient interaction" similarly forms a particularly visible site where communicative/medical binaries are bridged; it also provides another instance where research has fostered changes in clinical practice. Nevertheless, it bears a paradoxical relationship to medical/communicative binaries, given that it defines clinical, epidemiological, and public health institutions primarily as loci of knowledge, not communication. Mediatization enters deeply into the production of racial inequities. In US health media, projections of idealized health‐consumers seldom mention race explicitly.
It is now some decades since the study of “linguistic ideology” was first proposed (Silverstein 1979), and the time is ripe for taking stock. This article considers some developments in this field as it has emerged and, in some respects, become normalized. Yet, normalized can mean backgrounded, taken for granted—perhaps obscuring important theoretical issues and methodological challenges. I revisit what is entailed by “ideology”; the debate between explicit and implicit sources of evidence (and why this binary is itself problematic); issues of ideological multiplicity and dominance; and questions such as: Must ideology be internally consistent? Why turn to semiotics, and should “language ideology” then be re‐labeled “semiotic ideology”? Are ideologies big programs, distinct from local metapragmatic activity? I address these questions while making methodological recommendations about research sites, contrasts and boundaries, attention to flows and connections, and a “centerpiece” method for tracing ideological work. An extended example concerning sociolinguistic variation in Maryland illustrates the discussion.
After decades of denigration and targeting by the state, Singlish—or Singaporean Colloquial English—has come into its own as a “uniquely Singaporean” phenomenon (Wee 2018), both a source and site of projects of raciolinguistic value‐creation (Rosa and Flores 2017). Today, Singlish is often presented as emblematic of broader “racial harmony” among Singapore’s four official races, yet it has also become an arena for articulating and rejecting critiques of racialized Chinese‐Singaporean majoritarian privilege. This paper analyzes interviews with literary producers, public presentations by artists, and published mediatized texts in which Singlish comes into being as a site of ideological contestation. It describes two contrastive figures and the discourse registers through which they are materialized: first, postracial policing, voiced as an insistence that Singlish is sui generis, and second, “Mother Tongue” sourcing, voiced as an insistence on adherence, in spelling and pronunciation, to the racialized “Mother Tongue” varieties (and their racialized speakers) from which Singlish items are sourced. I argue that these two figures and enregistered positions co‐participate in the production of an image of standard: a felt sense of standard‐likeness that emerges as an effect of aesthetic textuality (Nakassis 2019), even in the absence of overt standardization projects.
Language policy issues are inextricably linked with the socio-political vectors of development of a state. The significance of this problem field is actualised with a number of examples from modern history, when the "language issue" became a source of social tension, led to various kinds of conflicts, including interstate ones. The article is devoted to the analytical study of the modern specifics of language policy in the CIS countries. Research attention is focused on nine states that are active members of the integration association (Ukraine, which de facto does not participate in the activities of the Commonwealth, and Russia are not considered due to the presence of administrative national autonomies and the number of different ethno-cultural communities, as well as the need to reflect in the work the peculiarities of the functioning of the Russian language, which has a special status in the region). The practice of implementing the language policy pursued in the CIS countries allows to generalize and compare the experience of states that have relatively recently received sovereignty and the ability to form an appropriate agenda independently. The analysis made it possible to identify the general directions of language policy, typical for individual countries: 1) protection of the languages of the titular nation with the consolidation of their status as the only state and official for all spheres of communicative interaction (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan); 2) carrying out an alphabetical reform in order to switch to the Latin alphabet (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Uzbekistan); 3) implementation of the policy of state bi- or polylingualism (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan); 4) attempts to solve precedent linguistic problems (nomination of the state language for Moldova, the status of the Russian language for Armenia and Georgia).
Drawing on ethnography as well as media and archival sources, this article approaches issues of language and relations of power in Barbados along ideological axes of civilization, modernity, and intelligence. Its particular focus is on the ideologies of social and language boundaries and the semiotic processes of their construction, navigation, and policing. I use the concept of commensurability to engage with questions of inclusion, alterity, and (post)colonial selfhood brought into sharp relief by my Barbadian fieldwork and conversations.
Here the lens of the "mapping problem" described by Judith Irvine in participant framework studies is used to analyze shifts in the cultural tale “The Aitys of Birzhan and Sara” from its origin as an improvisational verbal duel in the late 19th century, to a Kazakh socialist opera during the Soviet period, to a nationalized historical reference in Kazakhstan. During the multiple recontextualizations of that social text, its discursive pragmatics and characters are preserved within the expanding and shifting participant frameworks enabled by the genre of aitys poetry. Birzhan and Sara are able to “speak”—as poets, characters, and ancestors—to a changing series of audiences, all of whom become involved and implicated in their words and story as a result. They—like all aitys poets and the tradition itself—become a source of cultural authority. Thus the mapping of this social text over time is used as an example, in order to explain why and how an oral tradition is able to overcome or absorb even serious intertextual gaps resulting from shifting historical and political contexts over a long twentieth century.
Este artigo é parte de uma pesquisa de Mestrado que teve como objetivo compreender os sentidos de língua no imaginário do senso comum, na perspectiva linguística da semântica enunciativa. Propõe-se a analisar como se dá o funcionamento semântico do (re)dizer no processo analítico de reescrituração. O aporte teórico-metodológico dá-se a partir da Teoria da Enunciação, pelo viés da Semântica do Acontecimento (GUIMARÃES, 2002b). Dessa forma, com os operadores enunciativos da reescrituração referidos, analisam-se os sentidos de língua presentes no imaginário do senso comum, e, posteriormente, a recorrência dos modos de reescrituração e seu funcionamento semântico. Observou-se que os modos de substituição e repetição são os mais usados, movimentando sentidos de especificação, sinonímia e definição. Os modos e os sentidos de reescrituração permitem inferir sobre o quanto ainda se confunde, no discurso do senso comum, o uso escrito e falado da língua, em que se atribui a correção e a norma à modalidade oral. Assim, surge um conflito entre o funcionamento linguístico e o funcionamento enunciativo, em que o “bem falar” é idealizado e funciona como critério que qualifica, ou não, o sujeito para ocupar os espaços sociais de poder e visibilidade, bem como os enunciados apresentam o ponto de vista de uma língua imaginária.
Cenicienta en Chueca (Cinderella in Chueca) is a collection of short stories by Argentine exile María Felicitas Jaime, published by Spanish gay/lesbian press Odisea in 2003, that represent the neocolonial relations between the Americas, Spain, and the European Union in a globalized age. The stories foreground communication technologies—including type, e-mail, chats, and dialects—in order to highlight the discursive nature of sexuality and to reveal the social, ethnic, racial, nationalistic, economic, gendered tensions underlying linguistic exchange. This article focuses on the neocolonial relations between Spain and Latin America in three stories from this collection—"Chateo" (Chat), "Ejecutivas" (Women Executives), and "Cenicienta en Chueca."
This article argues that while there exists considerable overlap and potentially productive dialogue between political theory and language policy scholarship, any such effort will be hampered by the dominant approaches to political theory that assume individualistic and instrumentalist conceptions of language. Augmenting the language ideologies approach to such questions, I argue that within political theory there are resources to address such issues. After summarizing a few key contributions of recent political theory to debates on linguistic justice and language rights, the article turns to the writings of John Locke to analyze the underlying conception of language in these approaches. It concludes by suggesting that the key developments that language scholars have focused on in terms of the rise of global English, questions of native versus non-native ownership of language, changes in the nation-state and the context of global capitalism create the conditions in which such liberal and individualistic are unlikely to have significant purchase for scholars of language and language policy. I conclude by suggesting other theoretical resources that yield more attractive perspectives including Antonio Gramsci, Valentin Vološinov and Mikhail Bakhtin.
In response to the limitations of the nation-state as a conceptual frame for the study of linguistic landscapes (LL), this article argues for a transnational approach that accounts for the material reconfigurations and symbolic reimaginations of space in the context of global flows and migrations (Appadurai, 1996). This approach enables one to recognize the fluidity of language practice that transgresses the metadiscursive regimes of language (Bauman & Briggs, 2003) upon which the ideological maintenance of native speaker idealization (Kachru, 2005) hinges. Drawing primarily on theories of language practice (Pennycook, 2010), language disinvention (Makoni & Pennycook, 2005, 2007), and language transgression (Pennycook, 2007), this article analyzes a variety of linguistic tactics in the transnational Korean LL, including those of the South Korean nation-state, and of ethnic Korean enclaves in the United States, including the Koreatowns of Los Angeles and New York. Language practice in the transnational Korean LL challenges the very boundaries of language that precede linguistic hierarchization (e.g., Inner Circle variety as superior to Outer and Expanding Circle varieties) and challenge the ideological commitment to native speaker idealization.
In this paper, I examine cultural citizenship not as a stable fact but as the product of everyday practice. The analysis focuses on educational discourses and classroom interactions in the school of a rural town in Spain and in relation to Moroccan immigrant children’s membership and identity. I show how teachers engage in distinction, authentication, and authorization practices, playing on essentialist notions of children’s ethnolinguistic identities and upholding notions of belonging to the nation that are predicated on homogeneity. This paper also examines how Moroccan immigrant children contest teachers’ essentialist formulations by asserting multiple, hybrid forms of membership and belonging.
The present contribution focuses on the effects of language dominance / attrition, context of
acquisition, age of onset of learning, frequency of general use of a language and
sociodemographic variables on self-reported language choice for swearing. The analysis is
based on a database to which 1039 multilinguals contributed through a web based
questionnaire. Results suggest that, according to the self-reports, swearing happens most
frequently in the multilinguals’ dominant language. Mixed instruction, an early start in the
learning process, and frequent use of a language all contribute to the choice of that language
for swearing. Sociodemographic variables were not found to have any effect. Frequency of
language choice for swearing was found to be positively correlated with perceived emotional
force of swearwords in that language. Quantitative results based on answers to close-ended
questions corresponded to participants’ responses to open-ended questions.
The dominant language ideology of contemporary Europe assumes standardized languages. In the political economic context of accelerated global migration and increased European unity, this ideology creates contradictions for speakers. The paper describes six types of contradiction that arise for non-elite speakers whose practices diverge from the ideals of standardization but who nevertheless find themselves judged by those ideals. Other contradictions arise for political elites. They come t believe that differences of standard language preclude a unified European public sphere, and fail to notice the intertextual processes and media circulations across standard languages that create politically significant publics.
Although the notion of language ecology has been both popular and productive as a way of understanding language and environment, drawing our attention to the ways in which languages are embedded in social, cultural, economic and physical ecologies, and operate in complex relations with each other, a critical exploration of the notion of language ecology points to the need to be very wary of the political consequences of biomorphic metaphors: the enumeration, objectification and biologisation of languages render them natural objects rather than cultural artefacts; linguistic diversity may be crucial to humans, but language diversity may not be its most important measure; and languages do not adapt to the world: they are part of human endeavours to create new worlds.
This essay argues that dominant ideologies and practices of communication, which it refers to as communicability, operate much like the “Hegemonic Medical Model” (Menéndez y Di Pardo, 1996). Hegemonic ideologies envision communication as a linear, unidirectional process in which messages are produced by experts –medical researchers, epidemiologists, etc.–, are circulated by health education specialists and reporters, and received by “the public”. Rather than being mere mechanical processes, spheres of communicability in health –or biocommunicability– constitute a form of governmentality that creates and ranks subjectivities and social locations. The article creates a dialogue with Latin American critical epidemiology and social medicine, particularly with the work of Jaime Breilh and Eduardo Menéndez, comparing how the frameworks proposed by these authors and the one outlined in this article analyze power, social inequality, state institutions, and neoliberal policies. At the same time that critical epidemiologists and practitioners of social medicine can provide important theoretical and political insights for informing research on biocommunicability, they have generally failed to identify and challenge hegemonic ideologies of communication and their effects on public health. The essay thus hopes to show that both epistemological and political facets of critical epidemiology and social medicine can be significantly strengthened by adding “communication” to the set of hegemonic concepts and practices that researchers evaluate critically and seek to transform. Specifically, communicability constitutes an important set of tools for constructing and naturalizing neoliberal ideologies and practices.
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