Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist

Perspective

Oxford Handbooks Online

Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical
Poststructuralist Perspective  
Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, and Massimiliano Spotti
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society
Edited by Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, and Massimiliano Spotti

Print Publication Date: Jan 2017 Subject: Linguistics, Sociolinguistics

Online Publication Date: Dec 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212896.013.21

Abstract and Keywords

Since emerging as a field of inquiry in the 1960s, sociolinguistics has focused on the
interrelationship of language and society. But as it expanded, it did so primarily on the
linguistic front. This volume builds on other attempts to reclaim the interdisciplinary
nature of sociolinguistics by insisting that the interpenetration of language in society and
society in language makes a division impossible. The title, Language AND Society, gives
both parts equal footing, and use of the term sociolinguistics extends beyond linguistics
and refers to the interdisciplinary enterprise that studies language and society. In
addition to reclaiming the interdisciplinary roots of sociolinguistics, this Handbook seeks
to move beyond the conceptual frameworks that informed twentieth-century
sociolinguistics by including scholars from around the world, and to pass from original
modernist and structuralist conceptualizations of language and of society into critical
poststructuralist positions.

Keywords: critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics, language, poststructuralism, sociolinguistics, society

THE academic study of the relationship between language and society is not new. Coulmas
(Chapter 1 of this volume) traces its origins to the work of nineteenth-century European
sociologists such as Emil Durkheim and Max Weber and early twentieth-century
European linguists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Voloshinov. This work eventually
culminated in the rise of sociolinguistics as a field of inquiry in the 1960s. Since its
founding, sociolinguistics has focused on the interrelationship of language and society. It
studies the social organization of language use “toward language and toward language
users” (Fishman, 1972a: 1), as well as how language structures society, with a focus on
identifying the origins of inequality among speakers (Hymes, 1973).

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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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The beginning of formal sociolinguistics has been traced back to an interdisciplinary
conference held at Indiana University, Blommington, in 1964, funded by the Social
Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation. William Bright, Susan
Ervin-Tripp, Charles Ferguson, Joshua A. Fishman, Allen Grimshaw, John Gumperz, Einar
Haugen, Dell Hymes, William Labov, Stanley Lieberson, and Joan Rubin were among
those in attendance (Fishman, 2008). Apparent in this list of attendees is a factor that has
haunted sociolinguistics from its beginning—the preponderance of American-born
scholars, especially white males. But also apparent from the names is its greatest asset—
the interdisciplinarity of the field from the beginning, with anthropologists,
educationalists, folklorists, linguists, psychologists, social geographers, sociologists, and
political scientists bringing their different disciplinary lenses to the study of language in
society.

As sociolinguistics grew and expanded, it moved ahead, as Joshua Fishman (1991) said,
“primarily on the linguistic front while merely ‘shuffling’ on the social” (128). (p. 2)
Complaining that sociolinguistics had become just another kind of linguistics, Fishman
(1972b) proposed the term “sociology of language,” which “must be more vigorously in
touch with social and comparative history, with social geography and with political
science than with linguistics” (272). Other labels proposed as attempts to reclaim the
interdisciplinary nature of sociolinguistics include ecolinguistics, educational linguistics,
and geolinguistics. This volume builds on this tradition in an attempt to bring balance
back to the field of sociolinguistics by insisting that the interpenetration of language in
society and society in language makes a division impossible. To do so, we have titled our
volume Language AND Society, giving both parts equal footing. In the same vein, our use
of the term “sociolinguistics” extends beyond linguistics and refers to the
interdisciplinary enterprise that studies language and society. To this effect, our
contributors use an interdisciplinary lens anchored in the social sciences, including
anthropology, economics, education, history, linguistics, political science, geography,
psychology, and sociology. This theoretical integration is complemented by a broad range
of research methodologies, including ethnographic, interactional, and macroscopic
studies of language and society.

In addition to reclaiming the interdisciplinary roots of sociolinguistics, our volume also

seeks to move beyond the conceptual frameworks that informed twentieth-century
sociolinguistics. One way in which we attempt to do this is by including scholars from
around the world, going beyond the North American founding tradition of
sociolinguistics. We also seek to move beyond the original modernist and structuralist
conceptualizations of language and of society into critical poststructuralist positions. In
the remainder of this Introduction, we outline the transformations in the study of
language and society that our volume makes evident. But we also make apparent how the
present critical poststructuralist scholarship on language and society owes a great deal of
gratitude to those who labored in the past to recognize language as an essential
formative element of modern society.

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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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Positivist Modernist Sociolinguistics

Though monolingualism in contemporary society is often positioned as the norm to which
all should aspire, this has not always been the case. One of the first attested cases of the
construction of a monolingual empire was that of Spain. Through the marriage of
Fernando and Isabela in 1469, the kingdoms of Aragón and Castile were united, and
Castilian or Spanish was imposed not only in the European territory, but also in the
Americas (García, 2014; García and Otheguy, 2015). This push toward a monolingual
society was strengthened during the French Revolution, which advanced the concept of
the nation-state—an imagined construct that the political state corresponds to one nation,
one language, one culture (Anderson, 1983; May, Chapter 2 of this volume). As the era of
exploration and colonization got under way, missionaries in the Americas, Africa, and Asia
used these same nation-state ideologies to categorize the fluid language (p. 3) practices
of indigenous communities into named, bounded languages that were the property of
fixed ethnolinguistic groups (Lane and Mikihara, Chapter 15 of this volume; Makoni and
Pennycook, 2007).

In the 1960s, in the context of the independence of many African and Asian countries and
ethnic revival movements around the world, sociolinguistics became established as a
scholarly field. Confronted with the multilingual realities of many postcolonial contexts
and the clamoring of ethnolinguistic minorities, sociolinguists used nation-state language
ideologies to develop positivist modernist approaches to the study of language and
society. From this perspective, language was seen as a monolithic entity that was
connected with a bounded territory, and language-minoritized populations within those
places were often considered backward and in need of change. Cultural practices, too,
were conceptualized as wholes that were then bifurcated into dominant ones and local or
vernacular ones (Menezes de Souza, Chapter 13 of this volume). The world was bound in
a standard ideology, a dominant view about a world full of standard things, not only
language and culture but also monetary systems and weights and measurements, among
others (Ndhlovu, Chapter 7 of this volume).

The dominant framing of sociolinguistic research during this era was to solve what were
seen as language problems—the communities’ multilingualism and the lack of language
standardization of many minoritized languages. Sociolinguists aided governments and
institutions to ensure that people in newly developed nation-states adopted a standard
language that often represented the interests of the dominant group (Fishman, Ferguson,
and Das Gupta, 1968; Haugen, 1966; Rubin and Jernudd, 1971). Through what became
known as corpus planning, sociolinguists contributed to nationalist attempts to purify
languages of what were considered undesirable features. Cameron (1995) has used the
term “verbal hygiene” to describe the prescriptivist stance that polices the use of
language and that continues even today (see, e.g., Valdés, Chapter 16 of this volume). And
raising the status of languages (status planning), as well as acquiring more users of
languages (acquisition planning), became the other foci of language-planning activities.

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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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In an effort to standardize language, those practices that were different from the
dominant ones were pushed into private domains by the group in power. Similarly, static
conceptions of culture led to ideologies that privileged the strict separation of cultures in
ways that erased their fluidity and the fact that all cultural elements coexist with others.
Sociolinguists then normalized this strict separation of linguistic and cultural practices
with the concept of diglossia (for a critique of diglossia, see Jaspers, Chapter 9 of this
volume, and further discussion later in this Introduction).

The educational system has always played an important role in perpetuating these
bounded notions of language and culture. Mignolo (1996) uses the term “academic
colonization” to refer to the naturalization of concepts of language and culture that lie at
the core of the educational process. Education performs this academic colonization
through establishing borders. Valdés (Chapter 16 of this volume) explores the practice of
language borderization in educational discourse—symbolic boundaries that are made by
social actors to categorize people and “acquire” them. She explores the ways that schools
reify a type of language that is called “academic.” Since academic language is then seen
(p. 4) as a cognitive precursor to school success, children who are said not to have

academic language are excluded from rich instruction. These students are then left in
remedial programs that give explicit instruction on language forms without providing
students with the affordances to use language in rich and meaningful ways. When culture
enters schools in the form of multiculturalism it obscures the unequal power to which
cultural practices have been subjected and that have positioned language-minoritized
students as in need of remediation (Ndhlovu, Chapter 7 of this volume).

Unfortunately, sociolinguists in the twentieth century often accepted views of society,

language, and culture that were similar to the dichotomous framing of academic and non-
academic that have marginalized language-minoritized communities both in and outside
school. It is important to note that these modernist sociolinguistic assumptions about the
nature of language and culture were based on differences, not deficiencies. However, the
reification of these differences was used to legitimize the stigmatization of what were
considered “inferior” languages and cultures (Del Percio, Flubacher, and Duchêne,
Chapter 3 of this volume). The result was that the early efforts of sociolinguists to
improve societal conditions failed because they were describing imagined contexts where
language and culture were independent wholes and could coexist in a diglossic
arrangement. In response to the limitations of this positivist modernist approach, our
volume starts from a poststructuralist position that questions modernist assumptions
about language and culture in order to develop a critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics.

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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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Critical Poststructuralist Sociolinguistics

Critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics builds on insights from poststructuralist
framings of power and seeks to apply these insights to the study of language and society.
In particular, critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics builds on the microphysics of
power as conceptualized by Foucault (1978), which stipulates that power is not
concentrated in a single place, but is ubiquitous and exercised in social encounters in
which some participants have more value. As Foucault (1980) has said, power “reaches
into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions
and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (39). Martín-Rojo
(Chapter 4 of this volume) identifies three technologies of power—normalization,
governmentality, and subjectivation. These technologies of power are not repressive in
the sense that they silence people, but are instead productive in that they create subject
positions that individuals rely on to understand themselves and their relationships with
others. These subject positions are often depicted as objective ways of categorizing the
populace. In reality, they are products of socio-historical developments and serve as a
way of producing governable subjects to fit the political and economic needs of a modern
society.

Building on this poststructuralist view of power, critical poststructuralist

(p. 5)

sociolinguistics studies language practices in interrelationship to the socio-historical,

political, and economic conditions that produce them. This approach challenges
modernist positivist approaches that position the study of language as a search for
objective truth, and instead shifts the focus to understanding how it is that societies have
come to understand language in the ways that they have, and the ways that individuals
within these societies take up and resist dominant understandings of language. It also
seeks to understand the role of language in producing certain subject positions and the
consequences of the production of these positions. For example, Milani (Chapter 20 of
this volume) sees language as a way through which individuals and groups invoke sexual
identities and make sense of erotic activities. He brings attention to the role of language
in producing hegemonic heterosexual discourses that regulate sexuality by constructing a
discourse of what is normal and normative, and how non-normative sexualities are
negotiated in relation to these regulatory structures. In doing so, he, along with the other
contributors to this volume, adopt critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics in ways that
disrupt the past of sociolinguistics, develop new possibilities for studying the relationship
between language and society in our increasingly globalized and technological world, and
offer caution as to the role of sociolinguistics in advocating for a more equitable future.

Poststructuralist Disruptions of the Past

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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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Critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics disrupts the past of sociolinguistics by
questioning the ontological status of language and instead focusing on the ways that
language has been constructed in modern society. Extending the concept of language
repertoires proposed by Gumperz (1982), critical poststructuralist sociolinguists have
disinvented and reconstituted named and bounded languages (Makoni and Pennycook,
2007). This disinvention of language disrupts the focus on the distribution and usage of
whole languages in society contained within the classical Fishmanian question of “Who
speaks what language to whom and when?” (1965; see also Spotti and Blommaert,
Chapter 8 of this volume). Instead, the focus has become how and why speakers perform
language practices in a framework of complexity and unpredictability (Varis and van
Nuenen, Chapter 23 of this volume). Languages are then seen not as named enumerable
entities, but as linguistic human work, the consequence of deliberate human intervention
and the manipulation of social contexts (S. Makoni, Chapter 18 of this volume). Social
situations are not singular happenings, but as Jaspers (Chapter 9 of this volume) remarks,
they constitute a “constant negotiation between interactants.” The imposition of a
language is only possible through the “reproductive effect” of many social encounters in
different social domains (Rojo, Chapter 4 of this volume).

This move away from what has been called Fishmanian sociolinguistics (García,
(p. 6)

Peltz, and Schiffman, 2006) toward more nexus approaches (Scollon and Scollon, 2004)
that examine the intersection of ongoing social processes on discourse has brought the
study of language ideologies to the forefront of sociolinguistics (Silverstein, 1985). A
focus on language ideologies serves four important functions. First, it offers insights into
the ways that language-minoritized communities face discrimination because of their use
of stigmatized language varieties (Baugh, Chapter 17 of this volume; Charity Hudley,
Chapter 19 of this volume). Second, it provides insights into how it is that certain
linguistic forms become associated with certain types of people. Rosa and Burdick
(Chapter 5 of this volume) review the semiotic processes that construct social and
linguistic categories—rhematization/iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure (Irvine
and Gal, 2000)—and describe the ways that linguistic features come to be iconic of an
entire group, oppositions are projected onto some other level, and differences are erased,
thus producing value and establishing what counts. Third, it offers tools for analyzing the
ways that language is capable of constructing identity. Speakers, for example, use
language to embody racialized identities. But speakers also use language in order to
racialize, that is, to ascribe and prescribe a racial category to an individual or group of
people (Spotti, 2007; Urciuoli, 2011). It is for this reason that Rosa and Burdick (Chapter
5 of this volume) suggest that besides taking into account the speaker, we must also
acknowledge the listener, for it is listening subjects who may be authorized to legitimate
the representations of speakers.

Fourth, most relevant for the purposes of this volume, a focus on language ideologies
allows sociolinguists to turn the lens inward and examine the language ideologies that
have shaped and continue to shape the academic discipline of sociolinguistics. As Charity
Hudley (Chapter 19 of this volume) reminds us, the rise of modern linguistics and its
typology of the world languages and ethnic groups occurred as part of a process of racial
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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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formation. Examples of the production of other social inequality perpetuated by
sociolinguistics abound in the chapters in this book. For example, the phonocentrism that
shaped sociolinguistics has reified speech to the detriment of the deaf (Bauman and
Murray, Chapter 12 of this volume), whereas the graphocentrism of sociolinguistic
perspectives on literacy have privileged alphabetic forms of literacy as part of the
continued reproduction of the logic of coloniality (Menezes de Souza, Chapter 13 of this
volume). At a more concrete level, the language ideological perspective adopted by
critical poststructuralists disrupts foundational notions of classical sociolinguistics,
including diglossia, the native speaker, language policy and planning (including concepts
such as language maintenance, language revitalization, language endangerment,
language education policy), and multilingualism. We describe these disruptions in turn.

Diglossia, the functional compartmentalization and distribution of varieties of languages

(Ferguson, 1959) or of languages themselves (Fishman, 1967), had been observed to
“leak” in meaningful ways early on by Blom and Gumperz (1972). Critical
poststructuralist sociolinguists have further observed how linguistic practices index
different interpersonal roles and relationships in a process of “enregisterment” (Agha,
2005) that is not constrained in diglossic complementary relationships (Jaspers, Chapter
9 of (p. 7) this volume). Diglossia is then said to be, as Martín-Rojo (Chapter 4 of this
volume) describes, “a domination process, mediated by a linguistic regime, which
impedes the participation and blocks the access of an important part of the population to
socially significant social spheres.”

Another traditional sociolinguistic concept that is questioned by critical poststructuralist

sociolinguistics is that of the native speaker. As Bonfiglio shows (2007, 2013; Martín-Rojo,
Chapter 4 of this volume), the dichotomization of native and non-native speakers has
normalizing effects on speakers, with natives being constructed as “normal,” and others
as “abnormal.” In the framework of critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics, the concept
of what is a first language (L1) and a second one (L2) has also been questioned (García,
2009). Because of the inappropriateness of these terms, a new term has been coined—
new speakers (O’Rourke, Pujolar, and Ramallo, 2015). This term acknowledges the fact
that speakers do not fit neatly into categories of what is a native language or an L1, and
that there are speakers who identify with certain language practices, and yet have had
little exposure to those practices in homes or communities. Yet, critical poststructuralist
sociolinguistics interrogates these issues even further and questions how and why certain
people are positioned as new speakers, examining the language ideologies at play in this
positioning and the socio-historical context that has allowed this positioning to become an
intelligible subject position.

Critical poststructuralist sociolinguists join those who defend the linguistic human rights
of people (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000), but question how we go about doing this. For
indigenous peoples, for example, the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) has established their right to control their educational
systems and teach in their own languages (Article 14.1) (see Lane and Makihara, Chapter
15 of this volume). Indigenous people have “a historical continuity with pre-invasion and

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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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pre-colonial societies that developed in their territories, consider themselves distinct
from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of
them” (Martínez Cobo, 1986). That is, indigenous identity has two dimensions—a cultural
one (anteriority), and a political one (historical dispossession) (Lane and Makihara,
Chapter 15 of this volume). Although the sociolinguistic work that has surrounded efforts
in language maintenance and language revitalization has been especially important to
indigenous peoples (Engman and King, Chapter 10 of this volume), some scholars claim
that the categorization of language practices into “a language” is a form of epistemic
violence because it does not represent the actual language practices of people (see
Mühlhäusler, 1996, for the Pacific Rim). Critical poststructuralist sociolinguists thus warn
that unless constructed carefully, language rights may reinforce a standard language
ideology by considering minoritized languages as endangered and whole, and ignoring
the complex diversity found among language-minoritized communities (Moore, Chapter
11 of this volume).

Critical poststructuralist sociolinguists have thus increasingly questioned the fashionable

discourse of language endangerment that is centered on countable, named languages and
that does not interrogate social, economic, and political factors that are involved in
processes of linguistic minorization (Duchêne and Heller, 2007). Duchêne (p. 8) and
Heller (2007) question, “In whose interest is it to mobilize resources around the defense
of languages, and why?” (6). For example, in the past decade, digital databases to store
and tag data on endangered languages have proliferated (Moore, Chapter 11 of this
volume). But Moore (this volume) questions why these have proliferated, and what
aspects of language they emphasize and obscure, and why. The scholarly interest should
be, Moore says, in understanding the social processes that lead to language loss and how
they can inform efforts to reverse language shift.

Finally, critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics also calls into question the very idea of
multilingualism. It challenges the ways that multilingualism continues to focus on
language as enumerable objects. B. Makoni (Chapter 14 of this volume) argues that urban
language use in Africa does not behave according to the named categories of the Western
world. In the same way, Ndhlovu (Chapter 7 of this volume) remarks that in the case of
immigrants and diasporas in Australia, the traditional concepts of multilingualism do not
in any way apply; instead, these speakers’ linguistic performances are made up of what
are traditionally called varieties of English, African cross-border languages, small ethnic
languages, and languages acquired along the journey. Traditional concepts of
multilingualism fall squarely with what Quijano (2000) has referred to as the “coloniality
of knowledge.” Multilingualism has been theorized from the West, and not the Global
South, because the West is the site where dominant knowledges have been produced.

A concept that has come to the forefront in bringing subaltern perspectives into
theorizations of multilingualism is translanguaging. Translanguaging refers to speakers’
complex and active use of a repertoire of linguistic features (García and Li Wei, 2014). By
moving away from the concept of bounded named languages, translanguaging has the
potential to enact linguistic social justice by working against the linguistic hierarchies

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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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that all national languages hold (Otheguy, García and Reid, 2015). As an example,
Bauman and Murray (Chapter 12 of this volume) show two ways in which the deaf are
advancing the concept of translanguaging. Visual ASL (VASL) involves the increased use
of two-handed symmetrical signing that enables two tactile listeners to receive the same
information, one with the right hand and the other with the left. Tactile ASL (TASL) is
being used especially with the Deaf Blind Community, with two full bodies producing
linguistic patterning. As Bauman and Murray say (Chapter 12 of this volume) the deaf are
taking the creation of meaning making “literally into their own hands.”

The concept of translanguaging is part of a larger movement within critical

poststructuralist sociolinguistics to challenge bounded notions of language. Other terms
have also been proposed to break out of bounded notions of language—polylingualism
(Jørgensen, 2008; Møller, 2008), metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010), and code-
meshing (Canagarajah, 2011, 2013). This “multilingual turn” (May, Chapter 2 of this
volume) disrupts modernist conceptualizations of language that have haunted
sociolinguistics since its emergence as a field, in favor of more fluid notions of language
that seek to develop new subject positions for language users and that challenge
standard language ideologies. This push to develop new subject positions is especially
important considering the sociopolitical changes that characterize contemporary society.
It is to (p. 9) the insights that critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics offers in analyzing
these contemporary changes that we now turn.

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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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Poststructuralist Possibilities in the Present

In addition to disrupting the past of sociolinguistics, critical poststructuralist
sociolinguistics also offers new conceptual and methodological tools for studying the
communicative practices associated with the deterritorialization of contemporary society.
Though originating in a geographical territory, a place, the concept of society today
breaks out of the local to include the globe and cyberspace, a space that, as Blommaert
(2005) remarks, “can be filled with all kinds of social, cultural, epistemic, and affective
attributes” (222). Besides the deregulation of markets, there is a new deterritoriality
(Harvey, 2005). No longer is the traditional sociolinguistic concept of speech community
relevant. In fact, there has been what Marwick and Boyd (2010) call a “context collapse,”
with space, and also time, completely transformed. Geographic spaces are no longer
separate but interconnected, and thus, as Busi Makoni says (Chapter 14 of this volume), it
is nonsensical to talk about language in urban and rural contexts.

This deterritorialization requires a shift in focus away from place that is given pre-
discursive ontological status to space that focuses on the social meaning ascribed to a
particular location through discourse (Milani, Chapter 20 of this volume). This focus on
space allows for an account of the multidimensionality of meaning-making practices,
going beyond language understood as a verbal and written code, and engaging the visual,
material, and bodily sides of communication. This theorization of space has made inroads
in the field of linguistic landscape, which entails the study of any visible display of written
language and people’s interactions with these signs (Van Mensel, Vandenbroucke, and
Blackwood, Chapter 21 of this volume). A spatial analysis does not simply see the
linguistic landscape as a direct index of the community. Instead, space is understood as
an active factor in the semiotic process of meaning, with signs then becoming historicized
artifacts—what Scollon and Scollon (2003) have called “aggregates of discourse.” Critical
poststructuralist sociolinguistics regards linguistic landscapes as a conglomerate of
traces of human social activity, allowing for the interpretation of short- and long-term
changes in language and society, as well as contestation associated with contemporary
deterritorialization in which a speech community is no longer bounded to a particular
geographic place in the ways that they may have been in the past (Van Mensel,
Vandenbroucke, and Blackwood, Chapter 21 of this volume).

One factor in contemporary deterritorialization has been the continued displacement of

indigenous communities. Because of colonization, slavery, and plantation economies,
many indigenous groups have been relocated forcefully from their traditional lands. Thus,
they are no longer living in a “traditional” territory and their language practices (p. 10)
may fall outside those that are seen as “standard” languages, as in the case of many
creole languages and the many heteroglossic practices that are associated, for example,
with modern Rapa Nui, the indigenous Polynesian language (Lane and Makihara, Chapter
15 of this volume). In order to engage new speakers, a balance must be reached between
community efforts at institutionalizing the previously displaced language and the

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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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creativity of language practices today (Lane and Makihara, this volume). Otherwise,
language maintenance and language revitalization efforts will instill linguistic insecurity
and will fail (Engman and King, Chapter 10 of this volume).

A second factor in contemporary deterritorialization has been the new types of

technologically-mediated communication that no longer require temporal and spatial co-
presence as in the traditional sociolinguistic concept of the speech community. This is
especially visible when we look at social network sites. Despite enormous heterogeneity,
they constitute a single audience, as translocality and mass-mediated language have
become default modes of everyday social interaction (Varis and van Nuenen, Chapter 23
of this volume; Van Hout and Burger, Chapter 24 of this volume). Technological
communication, in addition to its increasingly translocal nature, is characterized by an
increasing mutimodality as different semiotic resources, or modes—image, video, speech,
writing, layout, gesture—are combined in texts and communicative events. Because
several different modes (for example, written, audio, video, images) come together in a
single platform (see Varis and van Nuenen, Chapter 23 of this volume), relations among
modes are important for understanding every instance of communication. This increase in
multimodality requires more action on the part of interlocutors as, for example, in the
cases of hyperlinks (Adami, 2015; Chapter 22 of this volume) and font, which now play a
more integral role in technologically-mediated communication (van Leeuwen, 2005;
Adami, Chapter 22 of this volume; Varis and van Nuenen Chapter 23 of this volume).
Spotti and Blommaert (Chapter 8 of this volume) call attention to the insufficiency of
traditional sociolinguistics when the act of writing, now employing many semiotic signs
and accompanied by unconventional spellings, acronyms, initialisms, and letter/number
homophones, has become a most important means of everyday communication.

In addition to demanding the development of new conceptual frameworks, new

technologies have also enabled new approaches to sociolinguistic research. For example,
multimodal means of recording, coding, and producing multimodal corpora are now
available. This has provided more opportunities for sociolinguistic analysis to go beyond
the verbal to focus on gestures, fashion/dress style, and styles as performances (B.
Makoni, Chapter 14 of this volume). Varis and van Nuenen (Chapter 23 of this volume)
point out that this digital data has especially two advantages: (1) its persistence means
that it can be automatically recorded and archived; and (2) its searchability makes it
possible to easily trace people’s linguistic practices. But as Moore (Chapter 11 of this
volume) and Varis and van Nuenen (Chapter 23 of this volume) warn us, there is danger
in digital communication’s searchability in that it can reinforce positivist modernist
conceptions of language by inadvertently treating these languages as static items in a
museum, rather than living languages of real people. That is why Varis and van Nuenen
(Chapter 23 of (p. 11) this volume) see promise in “ethno-mining,” which combines data
mining from searchable databases with ethnography that connects language practices to
the social, political, and economic processes that affect the real conditions of people’s
lives. While data mining can provide a deeper understanding of grammatical structures of
a language variety, ethnography can identify processes that produce the valuation of
language and speakers and that, as noted by Del Percio, Flubacher, and Duchêne
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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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(Chapter 3 of this volume), regulate speakers’ access to the production, circulation, and
consumption of resources. Ethnography is also used to examine the ways that subject
positions are produced and how speakers take up, negotiate, and resist them. The object
of inquiry then becomes the societal processes and discursive practices that lead to the
formation of language-subjects, with data mining providing one source of data in
understanding these processes.

It is also important to study the impact of technology on minoritized communities. On the

one hand, technology has enabled increased participation of others who had previously
been not only stigmatized, but also invisible, as well as those who are constantly moving,
like refugees and migrants. On the other hand, for the deaf, video technology has been a
blessing, although also a curse. Visual technology is enabling deaf people to be more
connected with hearing people. It has made “read outs” possible, with written texts
signed over the Internet. It is also now possible to use video technology to produce essays
that can then be organized, supported with evidence, and evaluated for rhetorical
effectiveness, much the same way as any other written essay (Bauman and Murray,
Chapter 12 of this volume). And yet, the rise of cochlear implants as a way to “cure”
deafness and genetic screening tests for deafness are impacting the deaf. Bauman and
Murray (Chapter 12 of this volume) remark, “At the same time that signed languages are
enjoying an unprecedented popularity and visibility among hearing individuals, their use
among deaf children is diminishing in the more technologically advanced countries.” It is
important, then, to evaluate technology-enhanced communication with caution.

The deterritorialization that characterizes our contemporary global society has

highlighted the limitations of modernist conceptions of language and culture. Critical
poststructuralist sociolinguistics provides new theoretical and methodological approaches
that do not rely on homogenous speech communities that are bounded to one
geographical location. Yet, as the next section will illustrate, a critical poststructuralist
perspective goes beyond refining concepts to fit contemporary society. It also provides
tools for analyzing the ways that language ideologies are shifting alongside changing
political and economic factors.

Poststructuralist Cautions for the Future

In conjunction with deterritorialization, contemporary society is also experiencing
changing political and economic structures. In particular, the last several decades have
witnessed the rise of neoliberalism that, according to Harvey (2005), involves
(p. 12)

deregulation of the markets, as well as the withdrawal of the state from many areas of
social provision and an increase in privatization. In this new economic world order,
expanding commercial markets and weakened dominance from central states have
destabilized social and cultural reproduction mechanisms (Heller, 2003, 2010). The rise of
transnational corporations has also produced changes in governance structures. Whereas

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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
Perspective
the old disciplinary systems of management organization were hierarchical and closed,
Deleuze (1992) points to the fact that they are now connected through discursive
networks of power (see Martín-Rojo, Chapter 4 of this volume).

Within this context of the rise of neoliberalism, the conditions for the production of
hegemonic language ideologies are changing (Pennycook, Chapter 6 of this volume). Del
Percio, Flubacher, and Duchêne (Chapter 3 of this volume) argue that in the era of
neoliberalism (or what they call “late capitalism”) language is a manipulable resource
used to discursively enact a political economy that needs flexible workers that produce
resources. Language is then utilized to classify and hierarchize workers according to
their productivity, which results in inequality. Wider social, political, and economic
processes that are beyond the control of individual speakers shape localized language
practices, and so there are new questions of regimentation of language, as well as agency
of speakers. For example, in the workplace emphasis has been placed on language and
talk, which Heller (2003) has coined as the “new word-force.” This is the result of
changes in management organization style from a more vertical and hierarchical
structure to an apparently more horizontal one where workers have more responsibility
(Moyer, Chapter 25 of this volume).

In this changing political and economic environment, Flores (Chapter 26 of this volume)
warns that calls for multilingual language policies may inadvertently support the
perpetuation of neoliberalism. He argues that these multilingual policies can be used to
produce subjects to fit the political and economic needs of neoliberalism by commodifying
language in ways that produce a neoliberal subject that is a flexible worker and lifelong
learner, capable of performing service-oriented and technological jobs as part of a post-
Fordist political economy. In its neoliberal framing, multilingualism can, therefore, be
seen as simply an extension of Euro-American regimes of coloniality of knowledge. This
continued coloniality of knowledge can be seen in the growing bifurcation between elite
bilingualism/multilingualism and minoritized bilingualism/multilingualism (Blommaert,
Leppänen and Spotti, 2012). On the one hand, language-minoritized people without
access to privileged global networks are isolated and have little commodifiable linguistic
and cultural knowledge. On the other, the elite are able to develop multilingual
cosmopolitan identities and fluid multilingualism to make themselves more valuable in
the global market (Flores, Chapter 26 of this volume; Ndhlovu, Chapter 7 of this volume).

To break out of this coloniality, Mignolo (2009) recommends adopting a stance of

“otherwise than” in order to rethink, reread and rewrite a world organized otherwise,
conceptualized from the borderlands (see Menezes de Souza, Chapter 13 of this volume).
(p. 13) The only way to think otherwise is for critical poststructuralist sociolinguists to

extend beyond advocacy for marginalized communities. This is not to say that advocacy is
unimportant. On the contrary, an advocacy-oriented stance can be seen throughout this
volume, including advocacy for the right to use sign languages (Bauman and Murray,
Chapter 12), for the re-instantiation of previously marginalized language-minoritized
communities (May, Chatper 2), and for indigenous rights (Lane and Makihara, Chapter
15). Yet, all of this work also offers conceptualizations of new subject positions that are

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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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socially situated and emerge from working directly with communities to question
hegemonic language ideologies. They offer alternative visions of the world where able-
bodiedness is not presumed to be the norm, where translanguaging subjectivities and
indigenous epistemologies are used to counteract Western hegemony. In short, all of the
chapters in this volume seek to imagine new possibilities for thinking and languaging in
the world.

In short, viewing language through a critical poststructuralist lens identifies tensions

between its role as being a regulator and an enabler. It allows for an exploration of the
ways that dominant language ideologies have been complicit in the formation of
governable subject positions both historically and in our current neoliberal context. At the
same time, it allows for an exploration of the ways that language can be used to develop
new subject positions that resist dominant relations of power. This tension also lies at the
core of what it means to conduct research adopting a critical poststructuralist
perspective. On the one hand, adopting a critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics makes
visible the process by which some gain authority to standardize language in their image,
excluding other language practices, as well as the societal consequences for doing so. On
the other hand, coming from the Western tradition, the use of a critical poststructuralist
perspective means that we are partially appropriated by the instruments we seek to
critique (S. Makoni, Chapter 18 of this volume). As Milani (Chapter 20 of this volume)
notes, “Knowledge is always partial, locally situated, and created by bodies themselves
shaped by histories that are particular in nature.” In this way, language ideologies are not
simply “out there” in communities that sociolinguists are working with, but are also
instrumental to the ways that we as sociolinguists have historically talked and continue to
talk about language. Critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics challenges us to constantly
reflect on the power relations that have shaped our current ways of conceptualizing
language and to imagine new and more inclusive ways of conceptualizing language. This
is a never-ending task in the pursuit of social justice that this volume challenges us to
take on, under the banner of moving sociolinguistics into the twenty-first century.

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Ofelia García

Ofelia García is Professor in the PhD programs of Urban Education and of Hispanic
and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages at The Graduate Center, City
University of New York. She has been Professor at Columbia University’s Teachers
College, Dean of the School of Education at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island
University, and Professor at The City College of New York. At the time of this writing,
she is also Visiting Professor at the University of Cologne. García has published
widely in the areas of sociology of language, bilingual education and language policy.
She is the General Editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language
and the co-editor of Language Policy (with H. Kelly-Holmes). Among her best-known
books are Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective; and
Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education (with Li Wei), which
received the 2015 British Association of Applied Linguistics Award.

Nelson Flores

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Introduction—Language and Society: A Critical Poststructuralist
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Nelson Flores is an Assistant Professor of Educational Linguistics at the University of
Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. His research seeks to denaturalize
dominant language ideologies that inform current conceptualizations of language
education. This entails both historical analysis of the origins of current language
ideologies and contemporary analysis examining how current language education
policies and practices reproduce these language ideologies. His primary objective is
to illustrate the ways that dominant language ideologies marginalize language-
minoritized students and to develop alternative conceptualizations of language
education that challenge their minoritization. His work has appeared in scholarly
journals such as Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Linguistics and Education,
TESOL Quarterly, and Harvard Educational Review.

Massimiliano Spotti

Massimiliano Spotti is assistant professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at

Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He is also deputy director of Babylon – Centre
for the Study of Superdiversity at the same institution. His research tackles the
theme of asylum seeking and identity construction through the analysis of social
media influence on the doings of asylum seekers. He has published his work in
several peer-reviewed journals including Linguistics and Education, Diversities,
Journal of Language, Identity and Education, Applied Linguistics Review as well as
co-editor of the Volume Language and Superdiversity (Routledge 2016).

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