Blommaert; political linguist

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1995 Conference - Linguistic Society of Belgium
introduce term "political linguistics"
"It was essential to our purpose
to be able to get a panoramic view of a series of developments in that field, and
so to seek coherence, structure, but also confrontation and conflict. Restricting the
conference to one of the themes previously mentioned would run the risk of
bringing together people who, by and large, already agreed on some basic
assumptions and premises; we wanted more diversity, more difference and
divergence in opinions. Hence 'political linguistics', a term which did not have the
currency of the more established terms, but which drew the attention of a wide
variety of scholars interested in language and politics.1"
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move from Critical linguistics and critical discourse which was based on "interrelation between language and society":
"shaped a European tradition based on (often Hallidayan) discourse analysis,
critical theory and post-structuralism, Mancism and feminism, and cross-fertilized
by new developments in discourse-oriented social psychology (e.g. Billig 1991;
Wetherell & Potter 1992). Developments in that field were (and are) directed by
what Ruth Wodak describes as 'a shared perspective', which focuses on
"analyzing opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance,
discrimination, power and control as manifested in language" ( 1995: 204)"

"Work within the
tradition has been characterized by its problem-oriented nature: preference is given
to topics which are sensed to be of particular sociopolitical relevance: ethnic
minorities, women, but also media discourse, political rhetoric, schoolbooks, the
structure of education and so on. The work is ofte11 explicitly political, and it
focuses on identifiable social and political actors. A particular concern is the way
in which the public domain functions as an ideology-reproducing system, in which
hard sociopolitical realities are shaped and reshaped by the virtuose (ab)use of
genres, instruments and channels of communication, blended into conununication
products which can hardly be decrypted as 'political', and in which the material
processes and direct interests of the groups producing the message can be
dissimulated or embellished. By doing this, Critical Linguistics and Critical
Discourse Analysis also attempt to enlarge the social-theoretical basis on which
their analyses are founded."

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 "by the work of Michael Silverstein (e.g. 1979).
Language ideologies or ideologies of language are shared perceptions of what a
language is, what it is made of, what pmpose it serves, and how it should be used.
These perceptions, Silverstein argues, are sociocultural in nature. They reside in
the grammatical organization of the language (Silverstein here reinstates Whorf)
as well as in semiotic processes at large, which Silverstein calls 'indexical': they
'index' sociocultural background knowledge and, hence, social structure, and so
give sense and 'reality' to social actions (see, for a discussion, Woolard &
Schieffelin 1994)."

"That way, language ideologies or ideologies of language
become a "mediating link between social structures and fonns of talk" (Woolard
1992: 235), and 'metapragmatics' - the "study of a metalevel at which verbal
communication is self-referential to various degrees" (Verschueren 1995b: 367)
- hccomes a central concern in the analysis of the political and ideological
dimensions of various forms of everyday language usage (see Kroskrity et al.
1992)."

"The same American anthropological-linguistic tradition yielded highly
critical concepts of text and text-meaning, focused on the way in which text can
be moved in and out of contexts and so become instruments for all kinds of social,
cultural and political strategies (Silverstein & Urban 1996, Bauman & Briggs
1990). Thus, textual practices can be identified as central political strategies for
creating, sustaining or solving conflicts, and conflicts can be inextricably linked
to textual practices (sec e.g. Briggs 1996)."

" could be noted that a different concept of 'ideology'
is used in the Silverstein-inspired work, than in that of the 'European' critical
linguists. In many Silverstein-inspired works, ideology is socially situated and
articulated in everyday practices (like in European critical approaches), but the
concept appears less 'harmful' or Jess explicitly power-imbued than in current
European conceptions. The latter are very often inspired by a public domainoriented
Frankfurt School approach. At the same time, a conception of' ideology'
as shared beliefs and perceptions of 'how things should be done' is not incompatible
with views of ideology as 'naturalized power', as power which no longer looks
like power, and can thus be inserted in studies which cover more familiar ground
for Europeans."

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" Various scholars have investigated the way in which linguistic analysis
carries an ideological load, either in the shape of particular conceptions of
language (as the studies in Joseph & Taylor 1990 demonstrate), or in the
structuration of linguistic research itself (as argued in Cameron et al. 1992)"

" A
fascinating and highly critical pattern of analysis into professional practice was
developed by Charles Goodwin (1994). Delving into the minute details of'expert'
talk, Goodwin finds 'professional vision': patterns of discursive practices that
shape the profession's identity. The detailed deconstruction of what can be read
in other contexts as scientific objectivity can easily be transposed to practices in
linguistics or pragmatics (Blommaert 1997)."

"Williams (1992) launched a
forceful attack against mainstream sociolinguistics, demonstrating that the bulk
of the work within that tradition uncritically adopted a Parsonian social-theoretical
framework; Kandiah (1991), Meeuwis (1994), and Blommaert (1995), among
others, criticized studies on intercultural communication for being concerned with
epiphenomena and for being burdened by mystifying concepts of 'culture' and
'communication' (see also Sarangi 1995). Mainstream pragmatics was criticized
because of its reliance on intentionality as a central concept (Du Bois 1987,
Duranti 1988, Sarangi & Slembrouck 1992)." Whoa. What is being criticized


"Another set of developments could be noted in the field of macrosocietal
language studies, more specifically in the study of language and nationalism and
in that oflanguage policy and language planning. Both had been 'sleeping' areas
of study, after the boom in language planning and language-and-nation-building
studies in the late 1960s and the 1970s "

issues - ethnicity/ nationalism
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Shift to language policies treated:
" from a descriptive or prescriptive angle, but they are now given an interpretive
analytical component. At the same time, these approaches are strongly interdisciplinary,
combining linguistic ethnography with historical, sociological and
political analyses. Nationalism is made tangible as a set of identifiable practices,
connected to and transmitted through power structures, and legitimized by various
kinds of peripheral discourses."

" Together, this bundle of features (of which language is a central
identificatory ingredient) makes up the people's 'unicity' (Blommaert &
Verschueren 1992). A comparison of such ethno-theories can yield insights in the
structure of different versions of nationalism - itself too often an object of
analytical homogeneism (see Blommaert l 996a). Analyses of such ethno-theories
can also elucidate the sometimes intricate interrelationships between the political
treatment of language issues - standardization, purism, pluralism or laissez faire
-and more general political agendas, whether connected to nation-building aims,
to democratization, or to more prozaic aims of dominance and control"

"This political dimension is probably a new element in the discourse of
language planning. In the past, the tradition of studies on language planning was
often marked by an assumption of political and ideological neutrality, by
rationalism and by a belief that an objective inventory of real linguistic needs,
resources and possibilities would yield the best language plan for any given
couhay (see Blommaert 1996b)."

South Africa - language after Apartheid; "language planning"

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"The shift is primarily located, we believe, in the
awareness of linguists themselves: the awareness that politics, power, ideology
and other concepts that were hitherto strictly off limits to self-respecting linguists
are relevant, sometimes even crucial, in explaining linguistic phenomena of
various types and sizes."

"Consequently, they have to be made part of the conceptual,
theoretical and methodological apparatus of language studies. Those who
believe that language and society are intertwined (and some people still don't)
cannot avoid considering the side-effects this has on the definition of their main
object of study. Language is a social phenomenon, ergo a historical, cultural,
political and ideological phenomenon."


"Consequently, they have to be made part of the conceptual,
theoretical and methodological apparatus of language studies. Those who
believe that language and society are intertwined (and some people still don't)
cannot avoid considering the side-effects this has on the definition of their main
object of study. Language is a social phenomenon, ergo a historical, cultural,
political and ideological phenomenon."
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"was language politics: language
practices (micro or macro, everyday or institutional, individual or collective)
which have political purposes, effects, characteristics or aspects. Given
Silverstein's all-embracing view oflanguage ideologies, every act of language is
part of language politics - the articulation of language ideologies - and what
sociolinguists used to call 'cultural' or 'social' dimensions of language and
language use now falls within the scope of language politics."

" Connections between various
categories were expressed by the connector 'and': language and culture, language
and cognition, etc. It now seems clear that an appropriate study oflanguage and
politics should seek to do away with this legacy of categorization, which rests on
an assumption of separate, closed but interacting entities, each having its own
characteristics and each being an autonomous object of investigation (language
and culture, for instance}. Not without malice, one could notice that this exercise
of chopping social realities into separate and autonomous objects has had a
neutralizing effect on the analytical scope and power of linguistics."

"This is, of course, a call for interdisciplinarity, one out of many. But the
interdisciplinarity proposed here is not a matter of either juxtaposing separate,
autonomous approaches, supported, if need be, by a tenninological or conceptual
consensus ad hoc; nor of picking theoretical insights or concepts a la carte from
adjacent disciplines. It is an intrinsic, internal interdisciplinarity which is based on
a redefinition of the object of study and of the scope of the approach. Definitions
of language should include the interwovenness with society, and the scope of
language studies should include concerns that are far removed from its traditional
restricted domain."
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