Language and Ideologies

Definition
- The study of language ideologies pertains
to all languages and language users.
- 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.

- Bloomaerts dimentions of attention

(1999) :
1. Historicity of language practices.
2. The details of their material context,
and
3. Their social reproducibility underscore
the concern for power relationships of
all types that informs language
ideological research.

Conceptual foundations
Woolard and Schieffelin emphasized
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.

The are two crucial distinctions to characterize

work in linguistic ideology :
1. The authors differentiation of neutral
Neutral uses include investigations of all systems of
cultural representation described in an objective
manner

2. critical uses of the term language ideology

critical uses of the term extend only to certain linguistic
phenomena that emphasize the socialcognitive
function of ideologies and concomitant possibilities for
bias and distortion based on speakers social and
political interests

Kroskrity (2004) proposed five axioms

characterizing related scholarship at
the beginning of the 21st century:
1. 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.
2. language ideologies are not unitary but internally
diversified.

3. 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.
4. language ideologies mediate between the social
structures that channel the experience of language
users and forms of talk practiced therein.
5. that language ideologies are major determinants of
social and cultural identities.
Korskrity (2004) when a language is used in the
making of national or ethnic identities, the unity
achieved is underlain by patterns of linguistic
stratification which subordinates the groups who do
not command the standard