Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language and Ethnicity 403
1988). Much of this work is concerned with issues of multilingualism and
efforts to revitalize endangered languages. Scholars typically conduct longterm
ethnographic studies in an area of the world, document the ways in
which two or more language varieties are used and perceived at home,
community, institutional and societal levels and situate their research
within broader frameworks of educational policy and language politics.
Schools and classrooms are often key sites in these studies since issues of
language teaching and learning are central to these investigations (e.g.
Heller, 1999; Jaffe, 1999).
Language and Ethnicity in the United States
It is impossible to discuss in this chapter all of the ethnic groups that
have been the subject of language and ethnicity research. Because of space
limitations and because of my own area of expertise, I have thus chosen to
focus this section on only a few groups in the United States. This section is
also further restricted to issues of language and ethnicity that involve the
English language in some way, whether I am discussing ethnic dialects of
English, issues of English language contact and shift in ethnic communities
or the use of English language varieties in the production of ethnicity.
I would like to emphasize that there is extremely valuable research
going on outside of what I explore in this chapter that informs our understanding
of language and ethnicity in the United States and in other parts
of the world. Some examples of international work that is focused on
issues of language and ethnicity and the English language include research
in New Zealand (e.g. Holmes, 1997), India (e.g. Kachru, 1983), South Africa
(e.g. Mesthrie, 2002), Hong Kong (e.g. Lin, 1996), England (e.g. Hewitt,
1986) and the Philippines (e.g. Bautista, 1997), to name just a mere few.
Much – though certainly not all – cross-national research fi nds that speech
varieties spoken by ethnic groups in less powerful positions are often stigmatized
while the speech varieties spoken by dominant ethnic groups are
not. Dominant group varieties are often institutionalized as the unmarked,
normative standard, while subordinate group varieties accrue a litany of
negative evaluations, such as ‘bad’, ‘lazy’, ‘uneducated’ and ‘corrupt’,
resulting in a type of iconicity (Gal & Irvine, 1995) that maps such evaluations
of speech onto the people who use that speech. But multilingual situations
around the world can be quite complex and particular, revealing
contexts where bilingualism may be more highly valued than a single language
(e.g. Heller, 1999) and languages with limited institutional presence
may gain prestige (e.g. Woolard, 1989).
In this section, I will provide brief overviews of language and ethnicity
research on African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian
Americans and European Americans. For Native Hawaiians, see Siegel
(this volume) on Hawai’i Creole English; for Jewish Americans, see Tannen