Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

4 Part 1: Language and Ideology
language users. As May (2001) explains, it is not the sole province of those
attentive principally to minority languages, but rather an approach to
investigation that can illuminate analysis of all languages, all communicative
interactions and all circumstances of formal and informal language
learning and teaching.
Blommaert (1999) makes the case for the urgency of linguistic research
informed by an ideological perspective because of the three distinctive contributions
it can make. These contributions, he argues, expand the possible
impact of much conventional linguistic and applied linguistic research,
which, in his view, has traditionally focused solely or mainly on language
forms or functions without appropriate attention to the essential dimensions
of the following: (1) historical context, or historicity, in relation to
analyses of human interpretations and interactions within and across institutions;
(2) materialism, which he defi nes as ‘an ethnographic eye for the
real historical actors, their interests, their alliances, their practices, and
where they come from, in relation to the discourses they produce’
(Blommaert, 1999: 7 ), a dimension that includes considerations of social
and political power; and (3) verifi able reproducibility, the extent to which
linguistic ideologies are absorbed into and transmitted by all sorts of institutions,
including schools, administrative agencies, military and religious
organizations, publications, advertisements and other media. He explains
that the more a linguistic ideology is taken up in any setting, the more
likely it is to undergo normalization, a ‘hegemonic pattern in which the
ideological claims are perceived as “normal” ways of thinking and acting’
(1999: 10–11). Linguistic ideologies thus infl uence our understanding of
what is usual; they shape a constellation of ‘common sense’ beliefs about
language and language use. As these beliefs continue to hold sway, they
assume ever-greater force, regardless of their accuracy or correspondence
to present realities. Blommaert’s dimensions of attention to the historicity
of language practices, the details of their material context and their social
reproducibility underscore the concern for power relationships of all types
that informs language ideological research. Increased attention to the roles
of power relationships within and across all institutions has characterized
many applied linguistic investigations in the last 20 years, especially those
done with an explicitly critical orientation (Pennycook, 1994, 2001) and
scholarly areas such as language policy (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996).
Power relationships, of course, emerge in all human endeavors, for
individuals and all the institutions that they create, maintain, challenge,
and continually alter and reconstruct through their patterns of transaction
and interaction. However, concerns about the relative power of individuals
and groups have become particularly crucial and contentious at this
moment because of the forces of globalization. Globalization is a multifaceted
phenomenon with a tremendous variety of causes and manifestations,
only some of which encompass language. As McKay and