Woolard and Schieffelin

55
"We review here selected research on
cultural conceptions of language-its nature, structure, and use-and on conceptions
of communicative behavior as an enactment of a collective order
(277: 1-2). Although there are varying concerns behind the studies reviewed,
we emphasize language ideology as a mediating link between social structures
and forms of talk."

56
"Not only linguistic forms but social institutions such as the nation-state,
schooling, gender, dispute settlement, and law hinge on the ideologization of
language use. Research on gender and legal institutions has contributed important
and particularly pointed studies of language ideology, but they are reviewed
elsewhere (see 81, 213)."

scientists - back off...indeterminate

"Moreover, linguistic ideology, language ideology, and ideologies of
language are all terms currently in play. Although different emphases are
sometimes signaled by the different terms, with the first focusing more on
formal linguistic structures 1 and the last on representations of a collective
order, the fit of terms to distinctive perspectives is not perfect, and we use
them interchangeably here."

many "histories" - coordination

57
"Our purpose is not
to distinguish ideology of language from ideology in other domains of human
activity. Rather, the point is to focus the attention of anthropological scholars
of language on the ideological dimension, and to sharpen the understanding of
linguistic issues among students of ideology, discourse, and social domination."

Various definitions and some key concepts

"Linguistic/language ideologies have been defined as "sets of beliefs about
language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived
language structure and use" (275:193); with a greater social emphasis as
"self-evident ideas and objectives a group holds concerning roles of language
in the social experiences of members as they contribute to the expression of
the group" (135:53) and "the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic
relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests"
(162:255); and most broadly as "shared bodies of commonsense notions about
the nature oflanguage in the world" (258:346). Some of the differences among
these definitions come from debates about the concept of ideology itself.
Those debates have been well reviewed elsewhere (9, 31, 78, 100, 298, 327),
but it is worthwhile to mention some of the key dimensions of difference."

 This is what I was thinking:
"The basic division in studies of ideology is between neutral and critical
values of the term. The former usually encompasses all cultural systems of
representation; the latter is reserved for only some aspects of representation
and social cognition, with particular social origins or functional or formal
characteristics. Rumsey's definition oflinguistic ideology is neutral (258). For
Silverstein, rationalization marks linguistic ideology within the more general
category of metalinguistics, pointing toward the secondary derivation of ideologies,
their social-cognitive function, and thus the possibility of distortion
(275)."

"citing" ideaology: "A second division is the siting of ideology. Some researchers may read
linguistic ideology from linguistic usage, but others insist that the two must be
carefully differentiated (164)."

58
"influential
theorists have seen it as behavioral, pre-reflective, or structural, that is, an
organization of signifying practices not in consciousness but in lived relations
(see 78 for a review). An alertness to the different sites of ideology may
resolve some apparent controversies over its relevance to the explanation of
social or linguistic phenomena."

"of language to strategies
for maintaining social power, from unconscious ideology read from
speech practices by analysts to the most conscious native-speaker explanations
of appropriate language behavior. What most researchers share, and what
makes the term useful in spite of its problems, is a view of ideology as rooted
in or responsive to the experience of a particular social position, a facet
indicated by Heath's (135) and Irvine's (162) definitions. This recognition of
the social derivation of representations does not simply invalidate them if we
recognize that there is no privileged knowledge, including the scientific, that
escapes grounding in social life (205). Nonetheless, the term ideology reminds
us that the cultural conceptions we study are partial, contestable and contested,
and interest-laden ( 151 :382)."

Interesting...probably what I learned in anthropology:
""has always been talking about anyway" as culture now in the guise of
ideology (31 :26), but the reconceptualization implies a methodological stance
(279). The term ideology reminds analysts that cultural frames have social
histories and it signals a commitment to address the relevance of power relations
to the nature of cultural forms and ask how essential meanings about
language are socially produced as effective and powerful (9, 78, 241)."

" epiphenomenon, an
overlay of secondary and tertiary responses (34, 36), possibly intriguing but
relatively inconsequential for the fundamental questions of both anthropology
and linguistics. But several methodological traditions and topical foci have
encouraged attention to cultural conceptions of language."

59
"The ethnography of
speaking was chartered to study ways of speaking from the point of view of
events, acts, and styles, but Hymes (158) suggested that an alternative focus on
beliefs, values and attitudes, or on contexts and institutions would make a
different contribution. This alternative enterprise has been taken up more
recently. Language ideology has been made increasingly explicit as a force
shaping the understanding of verbal practices (21, 46, 91, 138b, 210, 272,
303). Genres are now viewed not as sets of discourse features, but rather as
"orienting frameworks, interpretive procedures, and sets of expectations"
(128:670; see also 23, 42, 43). Local conceptions of talk as self-reflexive
action have been explored for a variety of genres such as oratory (210),
disputes (38, 116, 186, 188, 196), conflict management (253, 315), and also as
the foundation of aesthetics in such areas as music (90)."

Critical response moves:
"speech act theory (13, 270) stimulated thought about linguistic ideology.
Speech act theory is grounded in an English linguistic ideology, a privatized
view of language emphasizing the psychological state of the speaker while
downplaying the social consequences of speech (308:22; cf 244, 255, 275).
This recognition triggered taxonomic studies of conceptualizations of speech
acts in specific linguistic communities (308, 318), research on metapragmatic
universals (309, 310), and numerous ethnographic challenges to the key assumptions
of speech act theory (74, 150, 178, 221)."

60
"Bauman's (22) historical
ethnography of language and silence in Quaker ideology was an important
development, because it addressed a more formal, conscious, and politically
strategic form of ideology. Silence has been recognized as carrying a paradoxical
potential for power that depends greatly on its varying ideologization
within and across communities (103)."

"Advocating a view of linguistic ideology
as interactional resource rather than shared cultural background, Briggs
finds social power achieved through the strategic use not just of particular
discursive genres, but of talk about such genres and their appropriate use (41)."


language contact/ competition and politics
colonizing force
Ireland
61
"The equation of one language/one people, the Wes tern insistence on
the authenticity and moral significance of the mother tongue, and associated
assumptions about the importance of purist language loyalty for the maintenance
of minority languages have all been criticized as ideological red herrings,
particularly in settings where multilingualism is more typical and where
a fluid or complex linguistic repertoire is valued (10, 176, 194, 206, 238, 273,
282)."

" less attention traditionally has been given to understanding
how the view of language as symbolic of self and community has
taken hold in so many different settings. Where linguistic variation appears to
be simply a diagram of social differentiation, the analyst needs to identify the
ideological production of that diagram (162). Recent studies of language politics
have begun to examine specifically the content and signifying structure of
nationalist language ideologies (127, 277, 285, 326)."

"Peirce's semiotic categories have been used to analyze the processes by
which chunks of linguistic material gain significance as representations of
particular populations (104). Researchers have distinguished language as an
index of group identity from language as a metalinguistically created symbol
of identity, more explicitly ideologized in discourse (105, 168, 302)."

62
"Moreover, symbolic
revalorization often makes discrimination on linguistic grounds publicly acceptable,
whereas the corresponding ethnic or racial discrimination is not ( 156,
193, 197, 219, 326). However, simply asserting that struggles over language
are really about racism does not constitute analysis. Such a tearing aside of the
curtain of mystification in a "Wizard of Oz theory of ideology" (9) begs the
question of how and why language comes to stand for social groups in a
manner that is socially both comprehensible and acceptable. The current program
of research is to address both the semiotic and the social process."


"Linguistic borrowing might appear superficially to
indicate speakers' high regard for the donor language. But Hill (148) argues
that socially-grounded linguistic analysis of Anglo-American borrowings and
humorous misrenderings of Spanish reveals them as racist distancing strategies
that reduce complex Latino experience to a subordinated, commodity
identity. The commodification of ethnolinguistic stereotypes, ostensibly positive,
is also seen in the use of foreign languages in Japanese television advertising
(124)."

"Linguistic ideology is not a predictable, automatic reflex of the social
experience of multilingualism in which it is rooted; it makes its own contribution
as an interpretive filter in the relationship of language and society (211).
The failure to transmit vernaculars intergenerationally may be rationalized in
various ways, depending on how speakers conceptualize the links of language,
cognition, and social life."

63
parents


"Beliefs about what is or is not a real language, and underlying these beliefs,
the notion that there are distinctly identifiable languages that can be isolated,
named, and counted, enter into strategies of social domination. Such beliefs,
and related schemata for ranking languages as more or less evolved, have
contributed to profound decisions about, for example, the civility or even the
humanity of subjects of colonial domination (93, 166, 204, 216, 236). They
also qualify or disqualify speech varieties from certain institutional uses and
their speakers from access to domains of privilege (37, 57, 68, 120, 191, 288)."

Policy
" has sketched a taxonomy of language ideologies underlying
planning efforts: assimilation, pluralism, vernacularization, and internationalization
(4, 51). At an even more fundamental level, Ruiz (257) distinguishes
three fundamental orientations to language as resource, problem, or right (see
also 152), and commentators on bilingual and immigrant education have noted
such orientations conflated within these programs (117, 135)."

"
At an even more fundamental level, Ruiz (257) distinguishes
three fundamental orientations to language as resource, problem, or right (see
also 152), and commentators on bilingual and immigrant education have noted
such orientations conflated within these programs (117, 135). The model of
development is pervasive in post-colonial language planning, with paradoxical
ideological implications that condemn languages, like societies, to perennial
status as underdeveloped (32, 87, 110).

64
linguistic standard
 "recognized
as human artifacts, but are naturalized by metaphors such as that of the
free market (172, 277). Ideological analysis addresses questions such as how
doctrines of linguistic correctness and incorrectness are rationalized or how
they are related to doctrines of the inherent representational power, beauty, and
expressiveness of language as a valued mode of action (276:223; 18)."

purism
loan words "sanctity of language"
65

Othography - Palmer Method

Literacy
"Derrida's (71) deconstruction of a Western view of speech as natural, authentic,
and prior to the mere lifeless inscriptions of alien, arbitrary writing, has
brought considerable attention to ideas about the spoken and written word.
Eighteenth century Japanese elite notions of language also included a phonocentric
ideology stressing the primacy, immediacy, and transparency of speech
over writing (259). Javanese do not share the view of the original voice as the
authentic (273). Not all commentators on Western ideology find the oral bias
Derrida describes. Harris (131) argues that a scriptism founded in European
literate experience is smuggled into the apparent oral bias of contemporary
linguistic concepts, from the sentence through the word to the phoneme."

"Anthropological studies of literacy (e.g. its introduction in oral societies or
its use in schooling) recognized belatedly that it is not an autonomous, neutral
technology, but rather is culturally organized, ideologically grounded, and
historically contingent, shaped by political, social, and economic forces (53,
56, 58, 60, 97, 138, 161, 223, 266, 269, 290-292)."

66
"For
Chambri (108) and Yekuana, "fixity" in writing is the source of danger;
printed words are not responsive to social circumstances. Maori convictions
tliat there is an authoritative oral text captured only weakly by a written treaty
are an ironic Platonic counterpoint to European-origin New Zealanders' search
for a true text among multiple written translations of the treaty in which the
government is rooted (208)." Treaty

" Transcription, or the written representation of speech, within academic
disciplines and law, for example, relies on and reinforces ideological conceptions
of language (73:71; 83, 120, 159, 262, 295)."

Historical Linguistics
Colonial Linguistics
""Language has always been the companion of empire," asserted the sixteenth
century Spanish grammarian Nebrija (161, 225). Some of the most provocative
recent work on linguistic ideology, clearly tracing the links among linguistic,
ideological, and social forms, comes from studies of colonialism."

69
Histiography
"Professional, scientific linguistics in the twentieth century has nearly uniformly
rejected prescriptivism, but many authors argue that this rejection hides
a smuggled dependence on and complicity with prescriptive institutions for the
very subject matter of the field. Rather than registering a unitary language,
linguists helped to form one (66:48; 131, 132). Sankoff (261) argues that
contemporary positivist linguistic methodologies that invoke a scientific rationale
are imposed ideologically by the same interests that propagate norrnativism
and prescriptivism. The idealism of modern autonomous linguistics has
come under concerted ideological scrutiny (37, 157, 173, 320; cf 68, 227)."
70
 "To the
extent that speakers conceptualize language as socially purposive action, we
must look at their ideas about the meaning, function, and value of language in
order to understand the extent and degree of systematicity in empirically
occuring linguistic forms (cf 47, 129, 209, 212)."

 "To
understand one's own linguistic usage is potentially to change it (275:233).
Imperfect, limited awareness of linguistic structures, some of which are more
available to conscious reflection than are others, leads speakers to make generalizations
that they then impose on a broader category of phenomena, changing
those phenomena (see also 181). Structure conditions ideology, which then
reinforces and expands the original structure, distorting language in the name
of making it more like itself (37, 258)." Really? Always?



change


Errington
Labov

"Labov differentiates mechanisms of change from below
and above the level of speakers' awareness. He argues that subconscious
changes are extensive and systematic, while conscious self-correction, which
he labels ideology, leads to sporadic and haphazard effects on linguistic forms
(190:329). But several authors note that correlational sociolinguistic models
gloss over the actual motivating force of linguistic change, which often lies in
social evaluations of language (85, 162, 261).
Errington (86) argues that Labov's generalization is most applicable to
phonological variation, which may not be mediated by speakers' understandings
of their conscious communicative projects. More pragmatically salient
classes of variables are recognized by speakers as crucial linguistic mediators
of social relations, and speakers' awareness makes these variables more
susceptible to rationalization and strategic use (85, 240). Because such awareness
and use drive linguistic change, these variables require a fundamentally
different, participant-oriented analysis (86).
Irvine (162) notes that the formal linguistic characteristics of Hallidayan
anti-languages, such as inversion, are not arbitrary and that they suggest the
mediation of ideological conceptualizations of linguistic structures. Similarly,
subordinate languages in contact situations can acquire both functional and
formal properties of anti-languages."

71
"that reveal a tendency to see propositionality as the essence of language,
to confuse the indexical function of language with the referential function,
and to assume that the divisions and structures of language should-and
in the best circumstances do-transparently fit the structures' of the real world
(39, 162, 181, 212, 237, 250, 274, 275, 278). A focus on the surface segmentable
aspects of language, a conception of language focusing on words and
expressions that denote, is widely attested (32, 57, 112, 220, 277). But Rumsey
(258) argues that it is not characteristic of Australian aboriginal cultures,
which do not dichotomize talk and action or words and things, and Rosaldo
(255) similarly asserts that Ilongots think of language in terms of action rather
than reference."

ideology variation