Woolard - Language Ideology

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Language Ideology
KATHRYN A. WOOLARD
University of California-San Diego, USA
Introduction
“Language ideologies,” “linguistic ideologies,” and “ideologies of language” are

alternative labels for the same field of inquiry and are generally used interchangeably.
Their focus is on ideologies that are in some crucial way about language itself, rather
than all ideologies encoded in or through language. As most commonly understood
now, ideologies of language are morally and politically loaded representations of
the nature, structure, and use of languages in a social world (Irvine 1989). Societies
of all kinds have language ideologies. In childrearing, everyday interaction, and
interpersonal disputes as much as in ritual and political debates, small-scale traditional
societies characterized by apparent cultural and linguistic homogeneity are as affected
by language ideologies as are multilingual, multiethnic, late capitalist societies. Ideo-
logical representations of language(s) are enacted by ordinary community members as
well as official institutions and elites, including academic scholars.
By the last quarter of the twentieth century, it was well established in linguistic
anthropology and related disciplines that linguistic variability is socially patterned
and related to the distribution of power and resources at both interpersonal and
institutional scales. As the British sociologist of language Basil Bernstein (see Bern-
stein, Basil) famously put it, between language and speech, there is social structure.
Under the umbrellas of the ethnography of communication and sociolinguistics,
linguistic anthropology and related disciplines analyzed language not as an abstract
structural system, but as material communicative practices situated in and creating
social contexts of use.
This provided fertile ground for a question that preoccupied social theory in that
same period: what is the role of human agency versus institutionalized structures in
determining social outcomes and channeling lives? The question of agency was often
aimed at the participation of the dominated in the (re)production of or resistance to
their own subordinated position. For linguistic anthropology, the structure vs. agency
question had two facets: what is the role of individuals’ agency in determining the
communicative forms that they deploy, and what is the role of those communicative
practices in shaping social structures?
When the relation between two types of social phenomena is in question, a char-
acteristic analytic move of contemporary linguistic anthropologists is to posit a third
plane that intervenes to shape and reshape each of the others, an analytic move sim-
ilar to Bernstein’s own. In answer to the question of agency, linguistic anthropology
proposed that participants’ consciousness of communicative forms mediates both of
The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Edited by James Stanlaw.

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DOI: 10.1002/9781118786093.iela0217
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2 L A NGU A GE I D E OL OGY
the relationships in question. Such mediating forces are what have come to be known
as ideologies of language. To Bernstein’s dictum, linguistic anthropology added, “and
between language and social structure, there is language ideology.”
Features of language ideologies
There is much to unpack in the definition of language ideologies given above.

“Representations” encompasses more than such possible alternatives as “ideas,”
“conceptions,” or even “discourses.” The field does not rest on an idealist as opposed to
materialist foundation. Language ideologies occur not only as mental constructs and
in verbalizations but also in embodied practices and dispositions and in material phe-
nomena such as visual representations. They inhere in what Pierre Bourdieu called the
habitus, that is the implicit knowledge and ingrained sensibilities that are inscribed in
the body through repeated social experience (see Bourdieu, Pierre). Such sensibilities
include, for example, a listener’s shudder upon hearing a grating vowel pronunciation,
a student’s blush at an instructor’s attempt to use youth slang, or a speaker’s own
stammering shame at speaking a language variety she believes she controls imperfectly.
Ideologies of language also appear in institutionalized arrangements and objectified
representations that shape community members’ experience, such as the stratification
of different language varieties in school instruction (see Language and Education),
the mass media (see Media Representation of Language and Writing Systems), or the
linguistic landscape (see Linguistic Landscape).
Ideologies are morally and politically loaded because implicitly or explicitly they rep-
resent not only how language is, but how it ought to be. They endow some linguistic
features or varieties with greater value than others, for some circumstances and some
speakers. Language ideology can turn some participants’ practices into symbolic capital
that brings social and economic rewards and underpins social domination by securing
what Bourdieu called the misrecognition of the fundamental arbitrariness of its value
(see Bourdieu, Pierre). Through the alchemy of linguistic ideology, the linguistic capital
of dominant groups is endowed with distinction that seems inherent in the language’s
essence rather than historical accident, leading subordinated speakers to endorse the
superior value of a form they do not control themselves.
Language ideologies are not only about language. They forge links between language
and other social phenomena, from identities (ethnic, gender, racial, national, local,
age-graded, subcultural), through conceptions of personhood, proper human com-
portment, intelligence, aesthetics, and morality, to notions such as truth, universality,
authenticity (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). Even when representations are cast as
strictly linguistic, for example, in formal grammars or classifications of language
families, they implicate social relations. Just the act of categorizing linguistic varieties
as dialects of the same language, or of selecting one variety as the standard to be
codified, legitimizes boundaries between ethnic or national groups, and channels
the power relations among them. Distinct languages are produced by language
professionals as well as by speakers and their interlocutors through continual processes
L A NGU A GE I D E OL OGY 3
of differentiation and consolidation, in what the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (see
Bakhtin, Mikhail) called the centrifugal and centripetal forces of language.
Assumptions about the character of specific speakers or communities underpin eval-
uations of specific linguistic forms as, e.g. simple or complex, logical or illogical, rough,
authentic, refined, or precise. In the characteristic circular logic of ideology, the lin-
guistic forms construed in these ways are then taken as evidence of just such traits in
the speakers. This means that sometimes language ideologies appear not to be about
languages at all as they become pivotal to social institutions that regiment inequali-
ties, such as schools and courts of law. Taken-for-granted assumptions about language
become the suppressed premises of judgments of an individual’s intelligence, trustwor-
thiness, or professional suitability. One of the tasks of language ideology research is to
unpack the underlying linguistic assumptions in such social judgments to reveal how
conclusions about the worth of people may in fact be conclusions about the way they
use language.
Ideology is itself a multi-accented and contentious word. There is a neutral sense
that treats ideologies simply as shared systems of knowledge, but it more often has a
pejorative meaning of false consciousness or distortion in service of domination. This
negative charge of the term was not entirely intended in the inception of the field. Par-
ticularly during its early coalescence, work on language ideologies has run the gamut
from neutral comparisons of different cultural systems to clearly pejorative concep-
tions of ideology, some of them set in contrast to objective science. A near consensus
has developed that moves away from both the most innocent sense, of shared culture,
and also the most negative, of distortion in direct service of ruling interests. There is
still not complete agreement, but for most linguistic anthropologists, ideology is not
contrasted to some more truthful form of knowledge such as science. Expert models
are understood to figure among alternate ideological regimes of truth. This means that
a commitment to the study of language ideologies entails a reflexive commitment to
examine our own suppositions about language in this same light. Whether language
ideology research always lives up to this commitment might be questioned.
Neither vindicating nor condemning its subject, language-ideological research
emphasizes the socially situated nature of all representations of language and thus their
partiality, in two senses of the word. First, because ideologies are socially positioned
they capture only part of a phenomenon, thus giving a partial view in the guise of
a complete one. Second, that view is partial in the sense of interested, skewed to the
benefit of some social actors over others. However, the drive mechanisms between
representations and interested social outcomes are not direct and are not always
what they may seem on the surface. As Bourdieu argued, they work through fields
of social and cultural activity such as education, arts, entrepreneurial commerce, or
legal institutions, which refract the interests at stake through their own historically
developed logics.
Some ideological tenets saturate the consciousness of a society’s members as unspo-
ken doxa. This is arguably the case for a referentialist ideology that dominates Western
modernity and emphasizes one function of language, that of making propositions
about a world that stands outside language, over pragmatic and performative functions
that often go unrecognized. But language ideologies are rarely homogeneous across a
society. Conflicting ideologies of language can be found even in small-scale societies, a

fact that was sometimes obscured by traditional ethnographic descriptions of cultural
models of communicative competence. Moreover, even within a Western society as
dominated by the referentialist ideology as the United States, some (marginalized)
groups give greater weight to pragmatic social functions of language (persuading
others, securing resources, expressing care, etc.) and to language for action rather
than for reflection. These marginalized valorizations are manifested in interactional
practices, for example in child language socialization, that are judged as inadequate by
dominant institutions such as schools, reinforcing their marginalization (see Language
Socialization). Characterizing cultural representations of language as ideologies in
such cases serves as a reminder of the need to analyze their partiality, interestedness,
and historical grounding.
Finally, a defining principle of the field is that these representations have real
consequences for linguistic structures as well as social relations. Language ideologies
are not just predictable superstructures or passive transmitters from social structures
to linguistic forms; they reflexively shape both the social and the linguistic structures
that they purportedly just represent. In this sense the term ideology proved not
to be an optimal choice, given the inheritance of a base-superstructure model in
economistic theories that minimizes the import of ideology. Language is as ideology
does; just the fact of the ideologically informed social interpretation of a linguistic
form alters that form by imposing a template of meaning on it. So, for example, once
the generic (epicene) use of the pronoun “he” in English was identified as sexist and
discriminatory, it came to be heard as such by participants where it had not been
before (Silverstein 1985). There is ongoing contention around a related change in
Spanish, in the movement to replace the gender-marked ethnonyms such as “Latino”
(m.) and “Latina” (f.) with the gender-neutral written form “Latin@” or the non-binary
“Latinx.” This brings complex follow-on effects for the extensive system of obligatory
gender marking of nouns and adjectives in Spanish. This kind of feedback effect led
Silverstein to assert that linguistic ideology is an essential aspect of the “total linguistic
fact” that a science of language needs to take into account (Silverstein 1985).
The principle that ideology has systematic effects on linguistic form was a departure
from the received wisdom in anthropology as well as linguistics. In the mainstream
language sciences of the twentieth century, participants’ linguistic ideas had been dis-
counted as secondary explanations that neither correctly report nor significantly affect
a fundamentally autonomous linguistic structure. But late twentieth-century linguistic
anthropology’s emphasis on contextualizing communication as purposive social action
made it ripe to recognize a more meaningful role for speaker agency. Arguably, this has
been one of the most powerful aspects of this field, since it makes ideologies of language
inescapably relevant to the explanation of linguistic as well as social phenomena.
Coalescence of the field of inquiry
Three principal streams of research came together to bring ideologies of language

into focus in the early 1990s. The concept of “linguistic ideology” as “sets of beliefs
about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of per-

ceived language structure and use,” for example, in terms of correctness or beauty,
had been developed by Michael Silverstein (1979, 193) on a foundation of the
philosopher C.S. Peirce’s (see Peirce, Charles Sanders) semiotics and the Prague
School functional linguistics of Roman Jakobson (see Jakobson, Roman). This early
formulation seems to situate ideology at the more explicit end of the spectrum and
implicate its distorting function. Yet in Silverstein’s account, these ideologies are
also filtered less consciously through speakers’ only partial awareness of linguistic
structures and functions, which tends to interpret the pragmatic functions of lan-
guage in terms of referential truth value. Both of these filtering levels – the partial
awareness of linguistic structure and functions, and the more explicit and norma-
tive politico-cultural awareness – are encompassed as linguistic ideology in most
current work.
Discussions of “language ideology” also appeared by the 1980s, in studies of the
ideological armature of social inequality and domination, particularly in situations of
language contact. Some scholars treated language ideology as the more institutionalized
and prescriptive evaluations of language “that attempt to guide collective sociopolitical
beliefs and actions regarding language choices” (Heath 1989, 393). Standard language
ideologies in particular were illuminated by critical historical studies (see Standard Lan-
guage(s)). Increasingly, language ideologies were situated within a neo-Marxist frame
of political economy to analyze the load of social and political interest that they bear
(see Language, the Political Economy, and Labor). Studies focused on the forms of con-
sciousness that sustain or resist the dominance of standard languages over non-standard
varieties, majority languages over minoritized, and the cultural authority of some social
groups (ethnic, class, gender) over others. Accounts of language choice, code-switching,
or shift came to hinge on speakers’ own interpretations of the way that language use
could index their social positions in a local order situated within a larger political econ-
omy. So, shift away from a traditional language is not adequately explained as the direct
outcome of industrialization in an Austrian village or colonization and missionization
in Papua New Guinea; such linguistic changes are mediated by actors’ own percep-
tions of and responses to their position in a political-economic and cultural world (Gal
1978; Kulick 1992). Local language ideologies came increasingly to be analyzed as the
linchpins of language shift or maintenance in contact situations.
The third major stream that was brought into language ideology studies was
the critical analysis of scholarly linguistic theories. A fundamental influence was
Michel Foucault’s analysis of epochal discursive transformations in sixteenth- to
seventeenth-century Europe, from a conception of language as natural signs and a key
to the hidden nature of the world, to the classical idea of language as a neutral, trans-
parent medium for rationality and representation that is – or ought to be – autonomous
from the social order (see Foucault, Michel). Marx-influenced literary theorists such
as Mikhail Bakhtin (see Bakhtin, Mikhail) and Raymond Williams also shaped
this line of inquiry through their criticism of standard accounts of languages that
suppress struggles over linguistic meaning among contending social fractions. From
perspectives informed by the language ideologies of various non-Western cultures,
anthropologists criticized key linguistic concepts for projecting culture-bound
Anglo-American folk conceptualizations of language as universal analytic categories.

For example, speech act theory, viewed in language scholarship as a breakthrough
recognition of pragmatic over referential functions, was criticized as a projection of a
Western folk ideology that privileges individual intentionality (see Austin, J.L. (John
Langshaw); Rosaldo, Michelle). The critique of professional theories as “ideologies of
language” was made explicit in a seminal volume that challenged the claim of modern
academic linguistics to ideological neutrality and explanatory autonomy (Joseph
and Taylor 1990). Scholarly theories of language from sixteenth-century vernacular
studies to contemporary sociolinguistics came to be analyzed as themselves socially
positioned, and claims to a disinterested science of autonomous linguistic facts were
demythologized.
Although shared empirical territory among these three streams of research was
explored by more than one author, there were gaps between them, often divided
between so-called “macro” politico-cultural approaches and more “micro” linguis-
tically focused ones, between folk and expert ideologies, and between research on
societies conceived as complex and heterogeneous and those construed as more tra-
ditional and homogeneous. The recognition of a shared focus on language ideologies
brought these different approaches into a closer conversation that also encompassed
related work on topics such as metalanguage, language attitudes, language politics,
prescriptivism, verbal hygiene, and linguaculture.
Out of these varying treatments, ideologies of language gelled and took a place
on the agenda of linguistic anthropology, with an extended session at the annual
meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 1991 as a precipitating
moment. Several more conference panels as well as edited volumes followed and
defined the field for a wider audience (Blommaert 1999; Gal and Woolard 2001;
Kroskrity 2000; Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998). Language ideology was
taken up in sociocultural anthropology and in interdisciplinary conversations that
generated broader international interest in the primarily American discipline of
linguistic anthropology. Participants in these dialogues took different stands on
neutral vs. critical conceptions of ideologies, as well as on how discursively explicit
or implicit they are, and how integrated they are as systems. A degree of intel-
lectual disconnection still persists, perhaps owing to a reluctance to press points
of debate in favor of maintaining the productive ties established among scholars
from different traditions. Nonetheless, the varying work in this area proceeds with
mutual awareness now and has in common a recognition of the potential for par-
ticipants’ own apprehensions of language to have consequential linguistic and social
effects that repay systematic analysis. The affordances and constraints of linguistic
consciousness have increasingly come to be situated within the frame of social
power, uniting the semiotic and cognitive study of linguistic ideology as meta-
linguistic regimentation with social theoretical traditions of ideological critique. In
its most promising moments this is an explanatory project, with a goal of sharpening
accounts of the historical development of specific language ideologies as well as of
their social and linguistic consequences.
In the more than 25 years since language ideology took a place at the top of the
research agenda of American linguistic anthropology, the term became so ubiquitous a
keyword in conferences and publications that some authors now may eschew it out of
concern that it does not distinguish their work sufficiently. Yet, although its widespread
adoption may vitiate it as a trademark, the concept of language ideology pervasively and
productively informs more studies of language in use than ever, both methodologically
and thematically.
Theoretical tools
Language ideologies depend on semiotic as well as social processes. Important theoret-

ical tools have been honed in recent decades to analyze these socio-semiotic processes,
drawing heavily on the theories of C.S. Peirce (see Peirce, Charles Sanders).
Indexicality
A key concept in the semiotic analysis of linguistic ideology is social indexicality. An
index is a sign whose meaning derives from existential association with its object; it
points to something in the context in which it occurs. Language users everywhere
notice and associate particular linguistic forms with particular speakers or contexts in
which they have occurred. That is, they take the linguistic form as indexical, whether of
regional or class origin, deference to an addressee, sexual orientation, the seriousness
of an occasion, a state of mind, a personality trait, etc. There are differences among
analysts on whether first-level noticings of association are best conceived as ideological
or not. But generally there is agreement that there is no truly pre-ideological social
indexicality. Such noticing is itself an ideological process, since it responds to cultural
assumptions and social motivations for what counts as noticeable, and it involves fail-
ure to notice other forms, speakers, or contexts. The process of picking out associations
is positioned and partial.
Associations of this kind have been long been fundamental in social analyses of
language, and concepts developed earlier by sociolinguists and linguistic anthropol-
ogists can be unified within the theory of social indexicality. These include Erving
Goffman’s (see Goffman, Erving) frames and footings, John Gumperz’s (see Gumperz,
John J.) contextualization cues, and William Labov’s sociolinguistic indicators,
markers, and stereotypes (see Stereotype). Although Labov holds that ideology
has little effect on linguistic form, this difference of opinion owes in part to the
definitional problem already discussed, hinging on the degree of politicization and of
conscious awareness an analyst understands to be “ideological.” Labov’s early work
adduced considerable evidence of what other commentators now call ideological
effects, such as the vowels that marked claims to island identity on Martha’s Vineyard
(see Sociolinguistics).
Variationist sociolinguistics traditionally tracks the indexical relations of linguis-
tic forms to time-honored categories of social analysis such as class, gender, race,
and ethnicity. Once we recognize the mediating force of language ideologies, we
can see myriad social identities that can be indexed by sociolinguistic variables,
such as youth subculture orientation, occupational expertise, parenthood, and
more individualistic and ephemeral interactional stances and social claims (Eckert
2012). Moreover, social indexes do not just presuppose and mechanically reflect
preexisting social statuses; speakers and listeners call them into existence through
their interpretations of signaling value. That is, in picking out and mobilizing
associations from the flow of talk, actors do not simply perceive but also create
and recreate contexts of speaking and categories of speakers as well as types of
language.
Indexical order The socially indexical meaning of linguistic variables is dynamic, and
Michael Silverstein’s (2003) concept of the indexical order captures this in a systematic
way. An established, first (or nth ) order social indexicality of a linguistic form becomes
available for participants to exploit in interpreting their world and in positioning them-
selves socially and carrying out their social aims. At this second (or n+1st ) level, actors
explain and naturalize the sociolinguistic associations they’ve registered through a cul-
tural template, e.g. accounting for a way of speaking as not only associated with certain
contexts or speakers but as sounding more logical, or tougher, or more authentic. As
these interpretations emerge, speakers may exploit such ideologically valorized forms
by shifting styles in their own speech to project a quality or as an act of identity. That
is, recruiting such indexical meanings to their purposes, participants build a second
order of meaning on the base of the first. For example, uses of linguistic variants known
as honorifics, such as the “polite” “V” (Fr. vous, Span. usted) form of second-person
address in many European languages, or so-called high speech levels in Javanese, are
understood at a first order of meaning as respectful to the addressee. But in manipulat-
ing the honorific forms, at a second order speakers can in effect advance claims about
their own character or standing as well, for example, their superior refinement as they
assiduously draw on the V or high form, or a breezy egalitarian youthfulness as they
instead use the T (Fr. tu, Span. tú) where a V would be normatively expected. Such
dynamic indexicalities can continue to piggy-back to higher and higher levels.
John Gumperz’s earlier distinction between situational and metaphorical code-
switching captured this same creative exploitation of indexicality (see Code-mixing
and Code-switching). Bilingual or bidialectal speakers may routinely associate one of
their language varieties with, e.g. domains of formal education, and use that language
predictably in the classroom; this would be a situational choice and a first order of
indexicality. On the basis of this first-order association, they may also sprinkle the
standard variety into casual talk with peers outside the classroom, where the expected
language is a local dialect. That sprinkling of standard brings to the speaker’s current
interaction, metaphorically in Gumperz’s term or indexically in the Peircian system,
the image-enhancing connotations of education associated with it. Similarly, the
variables that William Labov calls indicators, which are stable associations of a social
category such as ethnic background or social class with a linguistic form, operate
at a first order of indexicality. When community members introduce such a feature
variably into certain contexts or styles to create social effects in their own speech, it
becomes a stylistic marker for Labov and second-order indexical in Silverstein’s system.
The distinction made by Elinor Ochs between direct indexicality – e.g. a caregiver’s
expressive stance of concern – and indirect indexicality – the association of such forms
of talk with women – is also a way to conceptualize the dynamism of the indexical
order and has been taken up by others for this purpose (Hill 2009; Ochs 1992).
Enregisterment Second-order semiotic processes trade in social typifications of lan-

guages and characterological typifications of speakers in a process now known as enreg-
isterment. Enregisterment recognizes complexes of linguistic features as typical styles
or registers, and associates them as wholes with types of speakers and types of speaking
contexts within a repertoire of varieties of a language. Enregisterment is a process, and
its study requires attention to the chains of social interaction by which such models
are formulated and become available to participants for use. Again in the character-
istic analytic move of contemporary linguistic anthropology, a plane of metalinguis-
tic awareness is proposed as mediating a relation between linguistic form and social
use posited in earlier sociolinguistic analyses. Register is no longer viewed analytically
as a sociolinguistic fact of patterned linguistic behavior, but instead as a metaprag-
matic one in which participants posit typifications and use them to guide their stances
toward language in use. This opens up a space in which speakers may take up different
stances toward the elements of a register they mobilize to varying ends, for example
when a man uses a form of language associated with women in order to enact affec-
tion. Speakers may embrace or distance themselves from a register, implicitly com-
menting on it in the process that Bakhtin (see Bakhtin, Mikhail) analyzed as dialogic
voicing.
Through different re-voicings, enregistered varieties can be further exploited in a
chain of ever higher-order indexicalities. For example, linguistic forms that become
enregistered to local urban varieties might then be exploited commercially as emblem-
atic city brands, commodified with a knowing wink on t-shirts and mugs for sale in
airports (Johnstone 2009). Moreover, indexical meanings at the different levels com-
pete, and higher order meanings can displace the lower order over time. The concept
of indexical order provides a socially and semiotically motivated account of changing
linguistic patterns as responses to ideological representations.
Indexical field Developing what is known as third-wave sociolinguistics, Penelope

Eckert further theorized the principled set of indexical meanings that can be mobilized
as an indexical field, a constellation of meanings that are linked by the logic of ideo-
logical moves through the indexical order (Eckert 2012). This third wave is descended
from Labovian variationist sociolinguistics, but it is crucially informed by an ethno-
graphic approach and by language ideology theory. In this approach, stylistic variation
has been reinterpreted as mediated by ideology and speakers’ own stance-taking. A
speaker’s linguistic style can be seen as an individually woven fabric of multiple social
positionings and claims to membership in communities of practice. Stylizations (as
well as commodification) involve more self-aware, higher-order indexicalities than the
recognized style that they exploit (see Style and Stylization). The inherently dynamic
nature of the indexical order and indexical fields provides a new account for linguistic
change that challenges the traditional distinction between intrinsic linguistic and
extrinsic social motivations. Moreover, it brings apparent linguistic continuity under
the same umbrella as change, since both are subject to ideological mediation.
Indexical inversion Ideology may also make these processes of changing social index-
icality across escalating orders invisible. For example, in nineteenth-century Japan,
an era of deliberate elite reconstruction of the political and social order, an image
of “women’s language” as vulgar was developed on the basis of supposed schoolgirl
use of specific vulgar linguistic forms. Miyako Inoue argues that in fact there was no
evidence for any socially recognized vulgarity of those forms prior to their attachment
to schoolgirl speech, which was promulgated by male cultural elites. That is, the value
indexed was created after the indexical sign of it, in a form of creative indexicality
that Inoue terms indexical inversion. She sees a collapse of the chain of sign relations
here, with a second-order meaning – vulgarity, derived from association with young
females – masquerading as the first (Inoue 2004). This flattening of history is charac-
teristic of ideology, which naturalizes historical artifacts as timeless and inevitable.
Semiosis beyond indexicality

Although indexicality has been foundational to the theorization of language ideology,
it is not the only significant semiotic process in this field. In influential studies of the
semiotics of social distinction and linguistic differentiation, Judith Irvine and Susan Gal
have contributed three important semiotic concepts to the study of language ideology
that move beyond indexicality. They dubbed these iconization (in later work renamed
rhematization to fit better with Peircian terminology), erasure, and fractal recursivity
(Irvine and Gal 2000).
Iconization/rhematization An icon is a sign whose meaning is based on (the attribu-

tion of) resemblance to its object. In iconization, participants treat linguistic forms
as if they were depictions of the character of speakers associated with them; social
indexes become indexical icons. Speakers are taken to be the way that they supposedly
sound (e.g. noble, lazy, rational, simple, elegant). In turn, that sound comes to be
heard as itself epitomizing that quality. In a simple example in American English,
“dropping one’s g’s” as in “huntin’ an’ fishin” is often characterized as a lazy or relaxed
way of speaking. The label itself suggests these meanings, since the pronunciation is
cast as omitting an element, rather than substituting one sound for another, which
is the actual case phonetically. Through iconization, the phonetic segment is taken as
evidence that the speakers who use this feature are themselves lazy, or selecting more
positive meanings from the indexical field, relaxed and down to earth, making this a
favorite stylistic element of American politicians on the campaign trail. Iconization is
found in expert ideologies as well. For example, nineteenth-century European linguists
classified the Sereer language in Senegal as the language of primitive simplicity to
match their view of Sereer speakers as a distinctively simple and childlike people in
comparison to Fula and Wolof speakers (Irvine and Gal 2000).
Erasure Iconic resemblances must be picked out of a field of possible qualities shared
and not shared between two entities. Noticing some means ignoring many others.
Therefore, an ideological concomitant to iconization is erasure, which overlooks or
even actually eliminates linguistic forms, qualities, and speakers that do not fit the
iconic image. In the Senegalese example above, sustaining the image of the simplicity
of the Sereer language required those European linguists to pay selective attention,
regularize grammatical structures, and interpret complexity and variations as deriving
from interference from other languages rather than from Sereer’s own original, pure,
and simple form. In an example of the erasure of speakers and contexts of speaking,
as African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is mediatized to racially diverse
audiences, it is associated with young males and “street” culture and read iconically as
tough, transgressive, and hyper-masculine. To sustain such an image, many speakers
and contexts of AAVE – women, elderly, children, church-going, a president of the
United States, etc. – must be rendered invisible through ideological erasure (Alim and
Smitherman 2012) (see also African American Languages (AAV, AAEV, Ebonics)). In
Catalonia, young people’s conviction that Catalan is refined has led not just to ignoring
but also to actual loss of forms for crude humor and insults in their Catalan repertoires,
and replacement by Castilian forms (Woolard 2016).
Fractal recursivity Iconization always trades at least implicitly in contrasts in order to

generate meaning: between masculine and feminine, between g’s “dropped” and “pro-
nounced,” between the simple folk and the refined, between simple and complex gram-
matical structure, etc. Fractal recursivity is the process through which such contrastive
sets, once established, become productive resources, projectable onto multiple social
domains and higher and lower scales. For example, in the Senegalese case discussed
above, the analogic linguistic and social hierarchy of “simple” Sereer and complex, “del-
icate” Fula was itself a recursive reproduction of the contrast drawn between African
and European languages and peoples. What is most significant about recursivity is that
a language or people can be deemed complex and refined at one social scale without
affecting the firm ideological conviction of their primitive simplicity when considered
at another scale.
Chronotope Allied with linguistic differentiation and enregisterment in language

ideology studies is the concept of “space-time” or chronotope taken from Bakhtin (see
Chronotope). Forms of speaking are not just enregistered to types of speakers and
social spaces; these spaces and speakers are situated in varying time frames as well. That
is, the domains of languages or registers are space-times. For example, Haeri likens the
chronotopic framing of Classical Arabic as a sacred language to Bakhtin’s description
of epic time, in which the language is placed on a stronger and more beautiful plane
that is separated from the everyday world of its users (Haeri 2003). The chronotope
that frames language use is crucial because it constrains the kind of character that can
be expressed and the degree and kind of agency granted to a social actor. Rural “folk”
are often cast not just as spatially peripheral, but also as unmodern and traditional,
living in the past (whether a golden or benighted age). Such a chronotopic frame sets
constraints on the kind of talk that urbanites and cosmopolites can and will hear from
rural folk – that is, perceive, grant an audience, and respond to. Folkloric traditions in
general are cast as having value precisely because they are temporally or chronotopically
removed from contemporary life. The characterization of Bergamasco in northern Italy
as a folkloric language may protect it from political repression because, denied coeval
status, it cannot constitute a threat to ruling powers. But ultimately, such folklorization
casts the proper position of the language as one of loss (Cavanaugh 2009). Similarly, the
Indonesian government’s creation of a protected category of adat, “native custom,” that
is anchored in a non-modern space-time has effectively narrowed ritual speech among
the Weyewa (Kuipers 1998). In contrast to these backward-looking chronotopes,
Jonathan Rosa (2016) argues that Latino/as in the United States are chronotopically
cast in both positive and negative public discourses as not-yet-arrived. Their “real”
social presence in English-dominant America is discursively postponed to a future era,
whether utopic, when they all speak English, or dystopic, when Spanish overwhelms
English (at the same time as their current Spanish-speaking presence is framed as
deficiently past-oriented). Linguistic chronotopes are not only other-directed; speakers
cast their own lives into different chronotopes that allow them different degrees of
legitimate protagonism in making use of different linguistic varieties or in taking up
stances (Woolard 2016).
Qualia Most recently, a Peircian version of the philosophical concept of qualia has
been used to further analyze the felt, phenomenological qualities attributed to iconized
linguistic forms. Qualia are the experiential instantiations of abstract qualities such as
softness, redness, fullness, lightness. These qualities are construed within an ideological
system (or indexical field), e.g. one that assigns different cultural value to warm vs. cool,
light vs. dark, or simple vs. elaborate. These qualia are parlayed in recursive iconizations
(see Qualia).
Linguistic authority
In reviewing the conceptual tools of language ideology studies, we have seen that a
prime topic on which they are brought to bear is linguistic and social differentiation. A
second major focus is on linguistic authority, encompassing both the authority of spe-
cific linguistic varieties and the linguistic construction of political and social authority.
Following Bourdieu as discussed earlier, it is well known that the misrecognition of the
source of value of dominant languages helps secure the persuasive power of established
social orders and the acquiescence of the dominated. Recognizing a more Foucauldian
sense of power as ubiquitous in all social relations, linguistic anthropologists have gone
further to show how not only dominant but also dominated groups, and individuals in
all kinds of relations, wield varying forms of linguistic authority.
Two main ideologies, anonymity and authenticity, typically underwrite linguistic
authority in modern Western societies. Although they contrast, they can buttress the
same language in different contexts. The ideology of anonymity represents a language
variety as a “voice from nowhere” that can belong to everyone because purportedly
it belongs to no one in particular (Gal and Woolard 2001). This is the classical
Enlightenment ideal of a disinterested vehicle of reference and therefore a transparent
window on universal truth. It is the voice generated by the bourgeois public sphere
of coffee houses and salons in Jürgen Habermas’s account of the Euro-American
form of political legitimacy that emerged in the seventeenth to eighteenth century
(see Public–Private (Sphere)). Linguistic anthropologists argue that this form of

sociolinguistically created authority rests as much or more on a language ideology as
on actual linguistic practices.
In contrast, the ideology of authenticity represents a language variety as the voice of
particular speakers rooted in particular localities. Authenticity emphasizes social index-
icality – who is speaking – while anonymity privileges reference – what is said. Conso-
nant with Romanticism, authenticity confers value on a linguistic form as the expression
of the essence of a group or a sincere self, allowing access to truths particular to that
social experience. Speaking in one’s “own” language is taken to be the guarantor of such
truths, as seen in Protestant religious beliefs and the ethic of hip hop (Morgan 2001) as
much as in linguistic nationalisms. The Romantic vision takes us from questions about
the general nature of language to the nature of specific languages, in the plural.
Both anonymity and authenticity are allied in Western traditions with an ideology
of linguistic naturalism, which marginalizes historicity and human agency in favor of
a vision of all language as “natural” and above the human will (Joseph 2000). Sociolin-
guistic naturalism further ranks the value of different linguistic varieties according to
whether they are seemingly effortless and naturally acquired versus studied and “arti-
ficial.” This ideology generates skepticism about deliberate language learning and lan-
guage planning (see Language Planning), and suspicion of non-mother tongue speakers
and bilinguals as unnatural.
These linguistic ideologies that have dominated Western modernity are far from the
only foundations of linguistic authority. Sacred origin and ritual authority have been
powerful ideological bases for many languages, from early modern Europe to Indige-
nous Pueblo societies in the twentieth-century US Southwest (Kroskrity 1998; Woolard
2002). Niloofar Haeri (2003) has argued against proponents of Modern Standard Arabic
that its persistent ideological foundation in the sacred is incompatible with linguistic
modernity. The sacred sign is not arbitrary, and therefore linguistic innovations are
negatively sanctioned. Users are only custodians rather than communal owners of a
sacred language, and are not granted the right to change something of divine origin.
Critiques of expert ideologies
In their exploration of the voices of modernity, Bauman and Briggs (2003) question
Foucault’s thesis of an epochal rupture between two monolithic epistemes, discussed
earlier. Their close historical case studies show that the classical vision of language asso-
ciated with John Locke and scientism contended with now lesser-known contemporary
views that tied the value of language to national tradition, social roots, and authen-
ticity. These were precursors of the well-known views of Herder and eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Romanticism.
Modern language sciences have inherited both of these ideological complexes,
Enlightenment anonymity and Romantic authenticity. Saussurean structuralism (see
Structuralism) and Cartesian formal linguistics (see Chomsky, and the Chomskyan
Tradition vs. Linguistic Anthropology) abstract from social uses an autonomous,
referential linguistic system. Sociolinguistics, with roots in dialectology, draws on
ideological authenticity. Analysts of expert language ideologies have critiqued both

of these disciplinary legacies. The discrete languages that became our objects of
inquiry are recognizable not as natural entities, nor even historical artifacts locatable
in actual linguistic practices, but rather prescriptive ideologies (Milroy and Milroy
1985; Gal 2006). The unitary languages posited as natural entities are created out of
the continual ideological and institutional repression of variation. This repression
buttressed emergent nation-states and also the rise of professional linguistic disciplines
legitimated by their own distinctive subject matter and methods.
Sociolinguistic research and the study of bilingualism itself inadvertently reinforced
the ideology of bounded languages and an array of concepts associated with it. Mon-
ica Heller and others have argued that bilingual policies are founded on an ideology
of dual monolingualisms and ignore or taboo the hybrid communicative practices of
actual speakers as inadequate, not real language (Heller 1999). Even the groundbreaking
interactional analyses that argued for seeing conversational code-switching as a skilled,
artful alternation between two linguistic systems have the unintended consequence of
valorizing the maintenance of boundaries between the elements of a bilingual reper-
toire (see Code-mixing and Code-switching). Spurred by the critique of the reification
of languages as objects of study, sociolinguists in recent years have pursued various
ways to conceptualize language as a fluid activity rather than an object, harking back
to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s early distinction between language as ergon (product) and
energeia (activity) (see Humboldt, Wilhelm von; Heteroglossia).
Variationist sociolinguistics since its inception in the 1960s has strived to locate “au-
thentic” speakers in order to study the truest vernaculars, uncontaminated by linguistic
contact and self-awareness. In doing so, sociolinguists participate in ideological era-
sure of linguistic forms and speakers, a position that has been rejected by third-wave
sociolinguists. They propose that linguistic authenticity should be treated not as an
objective analytic criterion, nor as a style that is simply natural to some speakers, but
rather as a fluid subjective notion that participants themselves recruit through perfor-
mative processes for social ends (see Authenticity). In the development of this critique
there is again the characteristic analytic move of contemporary linguistic anthropology:
between speakers and their putative authenticity, an agentive process of authentication
is posited (Bucholtz and Hall 2004).
Other expert tropes for legitimating languages that have come under scrutiny from
the language ideologies perspective are the biological metaphors of endangered lan-
guages and language death, which descend directly from the organicism of the Roman-
tic view (see Endangered Languages and Language Death). These are sometimes cred-
ited as tools of a strategical essentialism on the part of language activists. However, they
have also been criticized for taking ownership of language away from speakers and vest-
ing it in documenting experts and/or humankind generally, said to benefit from the
preservation of diversity.
Changing ideologies of language
In the current era of globalization and neoliberalism, researchers discern new ideo-
logical foundations of linguistic legitimacy emerging. Postmodernism is well known
for its master trope of irony and for an embrace of artifice and pastiche in place of
naturalist organicism. So too in language; a postnatural acceptance of artifice and of
linguistic eclecticism has been seen in many settings, particularly among young people
(see Crossing; Youth Language).
Commodification
The commodification of language itself within late capitalism has also been widely
observed. Language was commodified in earlier periods of capitalism as well; for
example, in the early twentieth century, G.B. Shaw depicted a British phonetician,
Henry Higgins (modeled on the real-life phonetician Henry Sweet), claiming to make a
tidy income from what is now called “accent therapy” for nouveau riche industrialists.
Lexicographers compiling commercial dictionaries, advertising copywriters, teachers,
and lawyers all have long traded in a literal sense on linguistic skills. What has changed is
not so much the fact of language as a commodity, but rather the extent and style in which
it is traded in the neoliberal era. Communication has been denaturalized and brought
under expert technocratic management as workers are deconstructed into discrete
“skill sets” that are repackaged for the labor market (Cameron 2000; Urciuoli 2008).
At the same time, other forms of linguistic commodification trade in naturalized
authenticity. In the Romantic era, the concept of folklore emerged to encompass cul-
tural production deemed to stand outside of the rapidly expanding capitalist economy.
Cast as the product of the anonymous but authentic folk, it was to be the national com-
mon in contrast to private property. In the late modern era, authenticity is becoming
property rather than anti-property: branded, copyrightable, its territorial origin a con-
trolled appellation. Political rhetorics of language as a civil or human right give way
to those of added value and economic development (Duchêne and Heller 2012). Lan-
guages themselves are fetishized as embodying marketable qualia of authenticity that
can be communicated to products to which the language is attached, from handicrafts
to sausages. Minoritized languages whose referential use value has diminished gain
exchange value as they become emblematic icons of the prized authenticity that is seen
as endangered by the same consumer culture that rewards it.
Linguistic activism
The scholarly recognition of language ideologies levels the ground between experts and
activists and may have enhanced the academic legitimacy of work on language politics
and language revitalization movements, particularly that done by engaged intellectuals
in their own societies (see Language Revitalization). The new focus on language
ideology provides a recognized scholarly turf on which to stand, as well as the tools
that give new analytic purchase. With this added legitimation, analysts can characterize
the minority language activism that they study as ideological without thereby simply
discrediting it. For example, in her long-term research on the Basque movement
in Spain, Jacqueline Urla (2012) finds a salutary dimension to the ideologization of
linguistic practice, by which she means the excavation of doxic ideologies. By revealing
the terrain of language habits as thoroughly ideological, activism pushes naturalized
habits and attitudes into an overt realm where they can be contested. Nonetheless,
Basque activists simultaneously naturalize new ways of understanding language, for
example, as measurable object of planning and expert technical intervention. Urla’s
analysis demurs from negative critique of the incursion of neoliberal ideology into
yet another domain. She discerns positive effects of these newer formulations, which
envision language not as inherited patrimony but rather as performative practice and
willed human activity.
Linguistic imposition vs. appropriation

There is considerable debate over how to understand the unity, ideological position-
ing, and social regimentation of global English(es) in the late modern world’s political
and cultural economy (see English as a World Language). A similar debate surrounds
Spanish as a world language (Del Valle 2009; Mar-Molinero and Paffey 2011). Even
the existence of global English as anything beyond an indexical field has been ques-
tioned. Where some see global English as top-down imperialism, others see grassroots
self-empowerment, and yet others see in both analyses the ideological renaturalization
and reification of language boundaries (see Linguistic Imperialism).
With a dominant language like English, controversies concern its imposition. In
contrast, when subordinated linguistic forms are taken up outside the communities
to which they are enregistered, the concern is about linguistic appropriation, a facet
of the ideology of authenticity. The use of minoritized language elements by speakers
of other varieties rarely subverts the regime of language that devalues that variety,
and instead may well reinforce invidious distinctions at the second indexical order.
For example, when young white males in the United Kingdom or the United States
recruit the enregistered social indexicality of forms of Black English to enhance their
own coolness or toughness for interactional purposes, they reinforce indexicalities
that stigmatize African Americans (see African American Languages (AAV, AAEV,
Ebonics)). When American Anglos use bits of what Jane Hill (2009) has called Mock
Spanish to achieve humorous or warm effects, she argues that they indirectly draw
on and ultimately reinforce the denigration of Spanish and Spanish speakers. Even
members of racialized groups such as comedians who ironize linguistic forms that
index their own communities must struggle to control the dynamic indexical order,
especially in mediatized performances. Ostensibly building second-order indexicalities
as critical metacommentary on stigmatizing first-order indexicality, they may make
that first-order meaning more widely available for adoption and even appear to place
their imprimatur on it (see Language and Race/Ethnicity).
Indirect and unintended ideological effects
A lesson of all these studies is that the political belonging of a linguistic form or a tenet
of language ideology is not transparent and directly readable from linguistic practice
or from social structure, but instead must be traced through the logic of the cultural
and social fields in which it operates in a given historical moment. Such observations
have been made about the effects of purist discourses, which negatively sanction the
perceived influence of other languages on what is held to be the original and authentic
form of a language. In a first reading, linguistic purism is often seen as iconic of social
purism that targets ethnic interlopers and patrols the ethnolinguistic border between
languages and therefore between linguistic groups. But socially contextualized research
shows that purist discourses are mobilized by members of linguistic communities
against other members of the same linguistic community and even speech community,
in internecine contentions for control over cultural and material resources. The purism
of e.g. the Royal Spanish Academy, on the surface is a way to guard against effects of
English-speaking imperialism. But at another level it is directed by one segment
of the Spanish linguistic community – peninsular Spanish elites – against other
segments, such as bilingual Spanish speakers in the United States, who are ruled out
of the boundaries of the linguistic community by stigmatizing their speech (Zentella
2017).
The social specificity of ideological effects leads to different, sometimes unintended,
outcomes of purist discourses in different settings. In a seeming paradox, for the
indigenous Mexicano language of Mexico, the least adept speakers mobilized the most
ferociously purist discourses (Hill 1985). Purist ideologies can trigger the loss of the
language that they seemingly mean to protect, as insecure speakers choose alternative
languages to avoid censure. Purification can lead to the narrowing of linguistic
resources and the stripping of a language’s registers (often the most colloquial forms)
as they are de-authenticated by speakers and experts as contaminated. However, these
kinds of loss are not the outcome of purism everywhere. For example, new purist
discourses have emerged with more flexibility in Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile).
There, purism is just one register that is used strategically for specific political purposes
by speakers who celebrate and use hybrid linguistic forms in other contexts (Makihara
2007).
As some of these examples suggest, activists’ efforts can backfire because of the unrec-
ognized logics of language ideologies. For example, expert language activists have tried
to promote a pluricentric or “polynomic” model for Corsican that celebrates dialectal
variation and resists the imposition of a uniform standard, only to find their flexi-
ble model resisted by community members for whom this does not fit the dominant
ideological template for a “real” language (Jaffe 2003). A language revival effort in the
indigenous American Kaska community encountered unanticipated consequences for
a program that had fluent elders model linguistic practices to school children. The
children took an unintended lesson from their reading of the indexical field: that the
language belongs to old people and is not appropriate to them at their age (Meek 2007).
Ideological contention over ritual language
Colonialism and missionization bring distinct linguistic ideologies as well as languages

into contact under conditions of inequality, leading to struggles over “the word” and
ritual language. The valorization of agency in speech is itself a language ideological for-
mulation based in the Western emphasis on individual intentionality that is not shared
universally. For example, in Indonesia, indigenous Sumbanese language ideology rep-
resented the power of ritual speech as based outside of the individuals who speak.
For this reason, Dutch Calvinist missionaries viewed Sumbanese ritual practices with
horror as a fetishism that lodged power in the ritual formulae rather than a sincere
agentive speaker (Keane 1997). Further, Joel Kuipers (1998) shows how the Sumbanese
Weyewa’s iconization of men’s ritual speech as necessarily “angry” and “hot” resulted
in a dramatic loss of these ritual practices in the encounter with Christianity. Mission-
aries generalized this genre of angry speech as iconic of the natural inner state and
savage condition of the Sumbanese, from which they needed to be rescued through
conversion. However, among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, missionization led not
simply to loss but to the development of a new type of linguistic authority. In traditional
Kaluli language ideology, only through voicing does the word gain authority. This tenet
interacted with missionaries’ emphasis on the printed book as the source of truth, and
reading aloud from books emerged as a distinctive new source of authoritative truths
(Schieffelin 2000).
Like religious ritual, legal ritual’s emphasis on the power of the word brings linguistic
ideology into high relief (see Language and the Law). In Hopi tribal courts, for example,
a form of authority cast as Hopi tradition encounters the Euro-American objectivist,
abstract ideology of language. As with religious ritual among the Kaluli, a new form of
authority is built out of this ideological encounter in real-time, incremental iterations
and material linguistic practices in courtroom interactions (Richland 2008).
As these examples show, ideological contention does not necessarily end simply in
domination and erasure, but instead can give rise to new ideological and linguistic
forms. Such studies of language ideologies in contact, contention, and evolution give
us models for the exploration of the total linguistic fact. They systematically analyze
the interplay of social structures of power and inequality, linguistic ideologies, and lin-
guistic form in use, and they give accounts that recognize principles of dynamic change
in all of these. Ideology is understood in such work as multifaceted, located in the
metapragmatic regimentation of forms as they occur in interaction as well as in explicit
metadiscourse on the one hand and unexpressed assumptions on the other. Grounded
in close ethnographic work, research on language ideology increasingly allows us
to comprehend change and stasis in social and linguistic life within one integrated
model.
SEE ALSO: Fishman, Joshua; Halliday, Michael; Jespersen, Otto; Silverstein, Michael
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10.1002/9781118786093.iela0217, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118786093.iela0217 by CAPES, Wiley Online Library on [16/03/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.

“Language ideologies,” “linguistic ideologies,” and “ideologies of language” are

The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Edited by James Stanlaw.

Features of language ideologies

There is much to unpack in the definition of language ideologies given above.

society. Conflicting ideologies of language can be found even in small-scale societies, a

Coalescence of the ﬁeld of inquiry

Three principal streams of research came together to bring ideologies of language

about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of per-

Anglo-American folk conceptualizations of language as universal analytic categories.

Language ideologies depend on semiotic as well as social processes. Important theoret-

Enregisterment Second-order semiotic processes trade in social typifications of lan-

Indexical ﬁeld Developing what is known as third-wave sociolinguistics, Penelope

Semiosis beyond indexicality

Iconization/rhematization An icon is a sign whose meaning is based on (the attribu-

Fractal recursivity Iconization always trades at least implicitly in contrasts in order to

Chronotope Allied with linguistic differentiation and enregisterment in language

(see Public–Private (Sphere)). Linguistic anthropologists argue that this form of

Critiques of expert ideologies

ideological authenticity. Analysts of expert language ideologies have critiqued both

Changing ideologies of language

Linguistic imposition vs. appropriation

Indirect and unintended ideological effects

Ideological contention over ritual language

Colonialism and missionization bring distinct linguistic ideologies as well as languages

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Johnstone, Barbara. 2009. “Pittsburghese Shirts: Commodification and the Enregisterment of an

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