Even if ideology is seen as “the more intellectual constituent of culture,” it is useful in considering those aspects of culture having to do with political economy, such as the division of labor. American Anthropologist 91:295–312.ĭistinguishes several valuable senses of “ideology,” such as a “notional” sense and a more “pragmatic” sense. Language, ideology, and political economy. Keane 2007 proposes “semiotic ideology” as a related, but broader, concept.įriedrich, Paul. See also the review from a few years later, Kroskrity 2004. Its history was more extensively reviewed by Woolard 1998. Woolard and Schieffelin 1994 shows how large this field had already grown by the mid-1990s. Meanwhile, from linguistics, an influential edited collection, Joseph and Taylor 1990, took up the question of what ideological bases underlay the “science of language” itself. Further developing the concept to make it more consistent with Marxist approaches to “ideology,” Gal envisioned language ideologies as differentiated between groups (of speakers) with different positions in a political economy. Silverstein 1979 offered an influential formulation of “linguistic ideologies” as “any sets of beliefs about language articulated by the users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use.” Taken up and elaborated by other linguistic anthropologists in the 1980s and 1990s, “language ideology” was given a more sociocultural emphasis by Irvine 1989, which defined it as “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests.” Along similar lines, Gal 1989 noted that language ideologies are not only explicit, but also include more tacit assumptions about the nature of language and its use. This second concern was being developed especially by Silverstein, who took linguistic form as his starting point and looked toward the social activity and cultural ideas embedded in it scholars in the ethnography of speaking school had tended to work in the other direction, starting from social formations. At the same time, there was a growing interest in seeing how politics and social action might be embedded in specifics of language structure. By the 1980s, several scholars in this school had turned toward a focus on language’s relation to power and political economy (see Friedrich 1989, Gal 1989, Irvine 1989). It emerged from the Ethnography of Speaking school of the 1960s and 1970s, which had emphasized cultural conceptions of language as these were manifest in culturally distinctive patterns of speaking. Language ideology is a relatively recent field of study. Works by anthropologists of differing intellectual commitments show traces of some similar debates, but within a general consensus on the value of joining ethnographic and linguistic research. However, those interdisciplinary links also entail some tensions, for example, concerning whether linguistic form or social issues take priority as subject matter, or whether analysis should focus more on texts or more on practices, or what is included in “language” itself. Because the concept of language ideology is so fertile, it connects to more disciplines and issues than can be reviewed here. Approaches rooted in disciplinary linguistics, such as Critical Discourse Analysis, are anthropology’s close kin, while political and social theorists writing on “ideology” are of obvious relevance. Although the anthropological approach to language ideology is distinctive, it overlaps with research in other disciplines. Authors writing on this topic have variously called it “linguistic ideology,” “language ideology,” or “ideology of language.” The slight differences of terminology have not signaled major differences in conception. Their positioning makes language ideologies always partial, in that they can never encompass all possible views-but also partial in that they are at play in the sphere of interested human social action. Language ideologies are inherently plural: because they are positioned, there is always another position-another perspective from which the world of discursive practice is differently viewed. Those construals include the ways people conceive of language itself, as well as what they understand by the particular languages and ways of speaking that are within their purview. It is to examine how people construe language’s role in a social and cultural world, and how their construals are socially positioned. To study language ideologies, then, is to explore the nexus of language, culture, and politics. Like other kinds of ideologies, language ideologies are pervaded with political and moral interests and are shaped in a cultural setting. Language ideologies are conceptualizations about languages, speakers, and discursive practices.
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