Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

8 Part 1: Language and Ideology
speakers who may make comments like ‘Today there is no respect’ because
of what they perceive as decreased use of honorifi c terms in conversation
tend to be men, while women, whose social position has changed for the
better, show more ambivalence in their attitudes toward this leveling of
linguistic usage.
Third, also consequential for this chapter, Kroskrity reminds us that,
within all speech communities (also an idealized notion), it cannot be
assumed that members share similar consciousness of their own or others’
language-related beliefs. Such variation in awareness arises in part from
differences in life experience; language awareness is shaped, articulated
and consolidated in a variety of settings, what Silverstein (1998) calls ideological
sites, and might include religious institutions or ceremonies, courtrooms
or classrooms, among others. Not all these sites are uniformly
accessible to all members of any group. Relatedly, the salience of linguistic
awareness differs substantially across as well as within communities.
Some communities are marked by a considerable concern for and active
contestation of language ideologies, whereas others show what Kroskrity
calls ‘practical consciousness with relatively unchallenged, highly naturalized,
and defi nitively dominant ideologies’ (2004: 505). In these latter
communities, language ideologies go largely unrecognized because of
their correspondence to common-sense assumptions. (Such assumptions
may not be accurate. Indeed, work by Preston [see Niedzielski & Preston,
1999; Preston, 2004a] and others suggests that they are often erroneous or
incomplete.) Still, such assumptions are enormously powerful in shaping
speakers’ views of variations within their native language (Lippi-Green,
2004; Preston, 2004b).
His fourth axiom is that language ideologies mediate between the social
structures that channel the experience of language users and forms of talk
practiced therein. In other words, speakers’ involvement in and perceptions
of the life activities that occur within all the social units in which they
participate, be they families, neighborhoods, villages, work groups,
schools and classrooms, clubs, or religious and occupational institutions,
shape their construction of linguistic ideologies. Hence, in the course of
time, speakers associate the experience of using certain patterns of language
and discourse regularly during activities in various social settings
with those settings, such that these linguistic and discoursal patterns then
come to index or denote a necessary contextual relationship, for speakers’
experiences there.
The fi fth axiom, one familiar to sociolinguists and cultural theorists, is
that language ideologies are major determinants of social and cultural
identities. Like Gal and Irvine (1995), he refers to the core notion so characteristic
of ‘classical’ linguistics in the 18th and 19th centuries, namely
that shared language forms and discursive genres constitute an essential
feature of a modern nation, with acknowledgment and awareness of their