Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

6 Part 1: Language and Ideology
worthwhile to summarize the principal conceptual themes and foci of
related scholarship. This précis draws heavily on two infl uential reviews
on the topic by linguistic anthropologists who have conducted foundational
research. Readers wishing more detail on the diverse genesis and
present scope of this academic area are encouraged to read the original
reviews in full. Fifteen years ago, Woolard and Schieffelin noted that their
discussion of ‘ideologies of language [was] an area of scholarly inquiry
just beginning to coalesce’ (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994: 55), emphasizing
that such ideologies deserved scholarly scrutiny because they simultaneously
refl ect and constitute ‘links of language to group and personal identity,
to aesthetics, to morality, and to epistemology’ (1994: 56). Thus
language ideologies serve to differentiate individuals and groups, provide
speakers with a sense of what is admirable and appropriate and shape
speakers’ understandings of the nature of knowledge that language
encodes. Woolard and Schieffelin remarked that previous social scientists
had resisted research into language ideology because it was too diffuse
and unbounded as a focus for investigation, but these authors further
observed that such intellectual resistance had begun to recede by the early
1990s. 2 They identify a continuing major diffi culty for the study of language
ideologies in that no single core literature exists to guide researchers.
Hence decisions about which topics are appropriate for study, what
counts as data, which investigative methods should be used and what
constitutes criteria for academic quality are left to individual investigators
to work out following their particular disciplinary predilections. This theoretical
and methodological diversity observed by Woolard and Schieffelin
continues very much in force, as will be evident from the variety of research
described in this chapter.
In particular, two crucial distinctions used by these authors to characterize
work in linguistic ideology can assist language educators in understanding
the scope and potential of related scholarship. The fi rst is the
authors’ differentiation of ‘neutral’ and ‘critical’ uses of the term ‘language
ideology’ (1994: 57). Neutral uses include investigations of all systems of
cultural representation described in an objective manner, while critical
uses of the term extend only to certain linguistic phenomena that emphasize
the social–cognitive function of ideologies and concomitant possibilities
for bias and distortion based on speakers’ social and political interests.
The consequent distortion, they note, may help to legitimize mechanisms
of social domination, and is often foregrounded in research on language
politics and on language, literacy and social class (see also Auerbach, 1992;
Pennycook, 2001, this volume; Street and Leung, this volume).
The second essential distinction in their review is that of the various
possible sites, and thus nature of data, appropriate for the study of language
ideologies. They observe that ‘some researchers may read linguistic
ideology from linguistic usage, but others insist that the two must be