Language and Ideologies

MARY E. McGROARTY

Definitions

This chapter defines and describes language ideologies, the abstract (and often implicit) belief systems related to language and linguistic behavior that affect speakers' choices and interpretations of communicative interaction (Silverstein, 1998). Language ideologies frame and influence most aspects of language use, but their influence is not always directly observable. Often their scope and constraints must be inferred from the nature of individual and group actions, expectations and decisions occurring in pertinent social realms (Lippi-Green, 1997; McGroarty, 2008). In describing language policy, Shohamy (2006) and Spolsky (2004, 2009) use a tripartite distinction, noting that language policy, the sum of decisions about and practices related to language, is shaped by three main factors: language practices, the actual language-related behavior of individuals and institutions; language management, the official and unofficial rules regarding the choice and nature of language codes; and language ideologies, the most abstract of these dimensions, the understandings, beliefs and expectations that influence all choices made by language users even when implicit. Whether explicit or implicit, language ideologies inevitably incorporate, often unconsciously, speakers' sometimes-idealized evaluations and judgments of appropriate language forms and functions along with opinions about individuals and groups that follow or flout conventional expectations.

Actual language behavior may not always be consistent with explicitly proclaimed language ideologies, for many reasons. One is that ideologies ncan include elements that are internally contradictory. Another is that ideologies related to language and language use do not exist in a vacuum, conceptually or temporally; they overlap and continually share social and conceptual territory with other core beliefs and related agendas that influence decisions regarding appropriate alternatives in education, work, government policies and so on in an ever-dynamic policy stream (Kingdon, 1995). The study of language ideologies pertains to all languages and language users. As May (2001) explains, it is not the sole province of those attentive principally to minority languages, but rather an approach to investigation that can illuminate analysis of all languages, all communicative interactions and all circumstances of formal and informal language learning and teaching.

Blommaert (1999) makes the case for the urgency of linguistic research informed by an ideological perspective because of the three distinctive contributions it can make. These contributions, he argues, expand the possible impact of much conventional linguistic and applied linguistic research, which, in his view, has traditionally focused solely or mainly on language forms or functions without appropriate attention to the essential dimensions of the following: (1) historical context, or historicity, in relation to analyses of human interpretations and interactions within and across institutions; (2) materialism, which he defines as 'an ethnographic eye for the real historical actors, their interests, their alliances, their practices, and where they come from, in relation to the discourses they produce' (Blommaert, 1999: 7), a dimension that includes considerations of social and political power; and (3) verifiable reproducibility, the extent to which linguistic ideologies are absorbed into and transmitted by all sorts of institutions, including schools, administrative agencies, military and religious organizations, publications, advertisements and other media. He explains that the more a linguistic ideology is taken up in any setting, the more likely it is to undergo normalization, a 'hegemonic pattern in which the ideological claims are perceived as "normal" ways of thinking and acting' (1999: 10–11). Linguistic ideologies thus influence our understanding of what is usual; they shape a constellation of 'common sense' beliefs about language and language use. As these beliefs continue to hold sway, they assume ever-greater force, regardless of their accuracy or correspondence to present realities. Blommaert's dimensions of attention to the historicity of language practices, the details of their material context and their social reproducibility underscore the concern for power relationships of all types that informs language ideological research. Increased attention to the roles of power relationships within and across all institutions has characterized many applied linguistic investigations in the last 20 years, especially those done with an explicitly critical orientation (Pennycook, 1994, 2001) and scholarly areas such as language policy (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996).

Power relationships, of course, emerge in all human endeavors, for individuals and all the institutions that they create, maintain, challenge, and continually alter and reconstruct through their patterns of transaction and interaction. However, concerns about the relative power of individuals and groups have become particularly crucial and contentious at this moment because of the forces of globalization. Globalization is a multifaceted phenomenon with a tremendous variety of causes and manifestations, only some of which encompass language. As McKay and Bokhorst-Heng note, globalization has been defined in many ways, including internationalization, liberalization, universalization, Westernization, modernization and, most recently, deterritorialization, meaning an alteration of social space 'so that space is no longer mapped in terms of territorial places, distances, or borders' (McKay & Bokhorst-Heng, 2008: 2). They observe that many of these definitions have been recognized for decades, and remark that the last definition, which foregrounds the roles of mass communication, has been most prominent in recent theoretical work, although the conditions reflecting other definitions are still relevant. In this chapter, we will use their definition of globalization: 'a reformulation of social space in which the global and local are constantly interacting with one another' (2008: 2; also see the McKay chapter, this volume). Whether, overall, it might qualify as beneficial (Bhagwati, 2004; de la Dehesa, 2007), deleterious (Rupp, 2006) or rather as problematic and uneven in its effects as a function of several geographic and demographic factors (Sassen, 1998) depends on many criteria and is beyond the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, all educators everywhere must attend to Luke's call to work out what the pressures and possibilities of globalization might mean for them. For language educators in particular, the facts of globalization at play in their spheres of action raise questions about both the material conditions affecting their work and 'which languages, whose languages, which texts and discourses' will be privileged and promoted to 'forge new critical and contingent relationships with globalizing economies and mass cultures' (Luke, 2005: xviii). In Luke's view, the appropriate project for related language policy and practices demands both interpretive and empirical study of what goes on in language classrooms and all their surrounding and supporting institutional actors. In its explicit invocation of language ideologies and identification of relevant data, research on language ideologies responds to his mandate. This chapter examines several types of ideologically oriented research in language education. The intent is to demonstrate the robustness of language ideology as an area of inquiry, summarize some of its diverse applications to analysis of language learning and consideration of appropriate pedagogy and provide a foundation for other chapters in this volume. A fuller grasp of this research can sharpen our appreciation of the many influences affecting language learning and teaching and assist educators in elaborating pedagogical practices informed by heightened social awareness and sensitivity (Luke, 2005; McKay and Hornberger chapters, this volume; McKay & Bockhorst-Heng, 2008).

Conceptual Foundations

Before turning to current research that describes and addresses various manifestations of language ideologies in language education, it is worthwhile to summarize the principal conceptual themes and foci of related scholarship. This précis draws heavily on two influential reviews on the topic by linguistic anthropologists who have conducted foundational research. Readers wishing more detail on the diverse genesis and present scope of this academic area are encouraged to read the original reviews in full. Fifteen years ago, Woolard and Schieffelin noted that their discussion of 'ideologies of language [was] an area of scholarly inquiry just beginning to coalesce' (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994: 55), emphasizing that such ideologies deserved scholarly scrutiny because they simultaneously reflect and constitute 'links of language to group and personal identity, to aesthetics, to morality, and to epistemology' (1994: 56). Thus language ideologies serve to differentiate individuals and groups, provide speakers with a sense of what is admirable and appropriate and shape speakers' understandings of the nature of knowledge that language encodes. Woolard and Schieffelin remarked that previous social scientists had resisted research into language ideology because it was too diffuse and unbounded as a focus for investigation, but these authors further observed that such intellectual resistance had begun to recede by the early 1990s. They identify a continuing major difficulty for the study of language ideologies in that no single core literature exists to guide researchers. Hence decisions about which topics are appropriate for study, what counts as data, which investigative methods should be used and what constitutes criteria for academic quality are left to individual investigators to work out following their particular disciplinary predilections. This theoretical and methodological diversity observed by Woolard and Schieffelin continues very much in force, as will be evident from the variety of research described in this chapter.

In particular, two crucial distinctions used by these authors to characterize work in linguistic ideology can assist language educators in understanding the scope and potential of related scholarship. The first is the authors' differentiation of 'neutral' and 'critical' uses of the term 'language ideology' (1994: 57). Neutral uses include investigations of all systems of cultural representation described in an objective manner, while critical uses of the term extend only to certain linguistic phenomena that emphasize the social–cognitive function of ideologies and concomitant possibilities for bias and distortion based on speakers' social and political interests. The consequent distortion, they note, may help to legitimize mechanisms of social domination, and is often foregrounded in research on language politics and on language, literacy and social class (see also Auerbach, 1992; Pennycook, 2001, this volume; Street and Leung, this volume).

The second essential distinction in their review is that of the various possible sites, and thus nature of data, appropriate for the study of language ideologies. They observe that 'some researchers may read linguistic ideology from linguistic usage, but others insist that the two must be carefully differentiated' (1994: 57). They further point out that some theorists have taken metalinguistic discourse about language (i.e. explicit discussions of language forms and uses) as the most accurate instantiation of linguistic ideologies, while others, in contrast, have seen ideologies as necessarily 'behavioral, pre-reflective, or structural' so that ideologies must be discerned 'not in consciousness but in lived relations' (1994: 58). Such fundamental differences in assumptions about data appropriate for the study of language ideologies affect choices of research methods and interpretive frameworks. Regardless of these differences in assumptions, however, they concur that researchers concerned with language ideology organize their investigations around the experience of and response to a particular social position. By doing so, their analyses will then reflect 'a commitment to address the relevance of power relations to the nature of cultural forms and to ask how essential meanings about language are socially produced as effective and powerful' (1994: 58). They celebrate research on language ideology as a vital link between linguistic and social theory; they also caution observers to be aware of the ironic contrasts between the casual generalizations about language found in the popular press (and elsewhere), which treat language attitudes and ideologies as uniform, invariant properties of individuals or groups, and the related scholarship demonstrating that, in contrast, ideologies are fluid, contested and situationally variable.

Ten years later, Kroskrity (2004) amplified several of the themes found in the 1994 article and also proposed five axioms characterizing related scholarship at the beginning of the 21st century. The first is that, while the perceptions of language and discourse implicated in language ideologies have been constructed in the interest of a specific group, current scholarship highlights the diversity of language behaviors and judgments that exist even in seemingly homogeneous social groups. These indicate that 'even shared cultural practices can represent the constructions of particular elites who obtain the required complicity' of others (Kroskrity, 2004: 501), as shown in his documentation of development of appropriate speech in the kivas (ceremonial chambers) of the Arizona Tewa. (Only men of a certain age can enter these, but their language use then becomes a norm to be recognized by the whole community.) This crucial insight then suggests that the distinction between neutral ideological analysis and critical ideological analysis is more a continuum than a clear dichotomy, a point particularly relevant for the present chapter.

The second axiom is that language ideologies are not unitary but internally diversified. They are 'multiple because of the plurality of meaningful social divisions (class, gender, clan, elites, generations, and so on) ... that have the potential to produce divergent perspectives expressed as indices of group membership' (Kroskrity, 2004: 503). A pertinent example is Hill's (1998) work on Mexicano (Nahuatl) communities showing that older speakers who may make comments like 'Today there is no respect' because of what they perceive as decreased use of honorific terms in conversation tend to be men, while women, whose social position has changed for the better, show more ambivalence in their attitudes toward this leveling of linguistic usage.

Third, also consequential for this chapter, Kroskrity reminds us that, within all speech communities (also an idealized notion), it cannot be assumed that members share similar consciousness of their own or others' language-related beliefs. Such variation in awareness arises in part from differences in life experience; language awareness is shaped, articulated and consolidated in a variety of settings, what Silverstein (1998) calls ideological sites, and might include religious institutions or ceremonies, courtrooms or classrooms, among others. Not all these sites are uniformly accessible to all members of any group. Relatedly, the salience of linguistic awareness differs substantially across as well as within communities. Some communities are marked by a considerable concern for and active contestation of language ideologies, whereas others show what Kroskrity calls 'practical consciousness with relatively unchallenged, highly naturalized, and definitively dominant ideologies' (2004: 505). In these latter communities, language ideologies go largely unrecognized because of their correspondence to common-sense assumptions. (Such assumptions may not be accurate. Indeed, work by Preston [see Niedzielski & Preston, 1999; Preston, 2004a] and others suggests that they are often erroneous or incomplete.) Still, such assumptions are enormously powerful in shaping speakers' views of variations within their native language (Lippi-Green, 2004; Preston, 2004b).