IN THE BEGINNING: The Art of Slowing Down and Thinking Things Through (Chapter 1, Part 4)
This is the fourth of a six-part series. Below is a table of contents I'll update as each part is posted to Minds.
2. The Evolution (or Transformation) of Language
4. Language Ideologies (you are here!)
5. Mathematics and Symbolic Logic Are Languages Too
6. Why Thinking Through Language is the First Topic of This Work
D. Language Ideologies
For the purpose of this work, I use the following definition of “language ideology” as provided by Lippi-Green in the paper we’ve examined previously (Accent, Standard Language Ideology, and Discriminatory Pretext in Courts):
[Language ideology is]: a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogenous spoken language which is imposed from above, and which takes as its model the written language. The most salient feature is the goal of suppression of variation of all kinds.
In other words, a language ideology seeks to impose a standard of language upon as many potential speakers as possible (for example, within a nation as in a national language, though certain social groups may exclude others on the basis of “official” languages).
Language ideologies may be the common denominator in what defines a social group, to include a nation. Woolard & Schieffelin, from same work referenced earlier, write:
…The nationalist ideology of language structures state politics, challenges multilingual states, and underpins ethnic struggles to such an extent that the absence of a distinct language can cast doubt on the legitimacy of claims to nationhood.
The language consensus – that is to say, agreement on what is and is not proper language (and thus, proper thinking) – informs the way the state structures itself. Absence of such a consensus may cause the entire system to dissolve as people perceive the broader societal organization to lack legitimacy. These assertions are not based on pure abstraction, but rather on empirical studies of linguistic histories, a point that Woolard & Schieffelin make elsewhere in their article. Suffice to say that beliefs and assumptions about the role of language, as well as how involved the state should be in regulating language, have been demonstrated as being core differences between various nations.
Literacy and systems of writing have a profound impact on language ideologies. They tend to lend credibility towards notions of language consensus, as Woolard & Schieffelin elaborate:
Ideologies of literacy have complex relations to ideologies of speech and can play distinctive, crucial roles social institutions. Even the conceptualization of the printed word can differ importantly from that of the written.
When it comes to the spoken word, we all have our personal beliefs about how words are “properly” pronounced. We’ve got light-hearted sayings about tomatoes and potatoes to reflect this, but sometimes we make character judgments about people we perceive as having pronounced a certain word incorrectly to our ears, and that’s where we start to get into dangerous behavior because of our ideologies concerning spoken language. Written language has a synergistic effect on the spoken word, particularly as it pertains to sustaining a language ideology; the two working together can create a far more powerful and entrenched ideological system than perhaps either could alone (though it is harder to imagine a written language without a strictly enforced spoken component – unless you interpret mathematics a certain way, which will be discussed later). Concepts of literacy are often profoundly important in society, as Woolard & Schieffelin articulate:
The definition of what is and what is not literacy is always a profoundly political matter. Historical studies of the emergence of schooled literacy and school English show the association between symbolically valued literate traditions and mechanisms of social control. Analyses of classroom interaction further demonstrate how implicit expectations about written language shape discriminatory judgements about spoken language and student performance. The nineteenth century foundation of English as a university discipline created a distinction between reading as aristocratic and leisurely and writing as work. Composition as skill training for employment is the dirty work of English departments…
Additionally, these authors argue, literacy is often fueled by cultural factors:
Anthropological studies of literacy…recognized belatedly that it is not an autonomous, neutral technology, but rather is culturally organized, ideologically grounded, and historically contingent, shaped by political, social, and economic forces.
These impacts are accelerated when factoring for institutions like courts of law or other systems which rely on transcription of “the truth,” particularly objective truths to which people are held to account, such as journalistic pursuits, as Woolard & Schieffelin continue to explain:
Transcription, or the written representation of speech, within academic disciplines and law, for example, relies on and reinforces ideological conceptions of language…In the American legal system the verbatim record is an idealist construction, prepared according to the court reporter’s model of English, against which incoming speech is filtered, evaluated, and interpreted. It is considered information if a witness speaks ungrammatically, but not if lawyers do, and editing is applied accordingly.
It is fair to ask at this point, provided the definition of language ideology I gave at the top of this segment, what exactly the problem is? Especially considering I went to great lengths to demonstrate how fit languages are those which actually feature less ambiguity and more common definitions, what is the problem with imposing a standard of language? The real crux of the issue is that language ideologies tend to enforce a certain interpretation of reality rather than allowing for reality to be assessed on its own merits. This idea might make more sense after reading the next chapter on the theory and limits of knowledge (which is to say – what is it about the world we can actually know, and how do we know that we have that knowledge to begin with?), but for now the important part is to understand how language ideologies shape our perceptions of what we think is objective reality, often in ways we’ve never even considered or thought about – sometimes to the point of actually blinding us to what objective reality might actually be in the first place (even though we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking we are, in fact, talking about objective reality!). I apologize if that sounds a bit convoluted, but much of our partisan discourse and the mechanics of how we perceive ourselves as disagreeing is, tragically, convoluted.
One might also ask how it is that language ideologies are imposed and sustained at all. It’s one idea to have an “ideal,” but how does this ideal become widespread and commonly accepted or practiced? This is an astute question with a thematic, if not unfortunate, answer – the entire system is imposed right in front of us but outside our conscious attentions. It begins in the classroom, as Lippi-Green explains:
Standard language (SL) ideology is a basic construct of our elementary and secondary schools; approach to language and philosophy of education. The schools provide the first exposure to SL ideology, but the indoctrination process does not stop when the students are dismissed.
Let me suggest that a certain ideology is at play with a seemingly innocuous phrase like “get an education.” When someone suggests someone else should “get an education,” what is often meant is that the person should go and seek a college degree. This has contributed to reducing or even eliminating the idea that education is a multifaceted process and that there are many ways to become educated, instead structuring a reality where the only place to become educated is at institutions of learning (often times called “higher” learning, revealing a bit more about the biases inherent in this language ideology). Since schools represent the primary – and perhaps, in the view of some, only – place to become “educated,” the idea of criticizing anything that is taught or learned in school tends to be anathema and can contribute to polarizing groups of people.
A hard truth that all of us need to come to terms with is that our entire education system is not, in fact, infallible (or even necessarily a window to objective truths) and likely never will be, as Lippi-Green explains:
Much of what the American educational system teaches children about language is factually incorrect; in this it is thorough, consistent, and successful across social and economic boundaries. The phenomenon has been observed by others.
If what we are taught about language is “factually incorrect,” and language is tied into the very way in which we think and structure our own realities, it follows that any system of knowledge built upon a shaky foundation of language would likewise be susceptible to problems.
Beyond the school system, Lippi-Green enumerates four other guardians or enforcers of standard language ideology active in our society, which she lists as “the news media, the entertainment industry, …what has generally been referred to as corporate America” and, as she ultimately argues later, the judicial system. Because language is so crucial in the process of defining one’s place in the world, totalitarian impositions of language ideologies have observable consequences, as Bonnie Urciuoli observes in the work “Language and Borders:”
The phrase “language and borders” suggests that language differences signify categories of person defined by ethnic or national origin and that these categories are opposed to each other. People act in ways that are taken as “having” a language, which is equated to “belonging” to an origin group. Borders emerge in specific contexts as a metonymy of person, language, and origin category. This metonym can be fleeting or quite rigid and in varying degrees politicized.
Stated another way, the language a person speaks comes to fully define that person in the perception of others. Ideas like ethnicity and nationality could be deconstructed as little more than a difference in language. You might say in reply, “but some people look significantly different from other people!” which would certainly be true, but such differences do not account for explanations of ethnicities or nationalities, especially among people who otherwise look fairly similar (for example, there are many different “Nordic” nations even if most of those people look fairly similar, or many different “African” nations, or many different “Asian” nations, or many different “European” nations and so on; physical differences to do not fully account for ethnic or national identities). Urciuoli elaborates further:
What does exist, in any society, is the fact of linguistic variation from which people deploy language forms in acts of identity. From such acts, people’s sense of community, group, and language emerge in specific places and times.
This need not be interpreted only with regards to nations – think also of subcultures, such as internet gaming communities, military organizations and units, different academic (and vocational) disciplines which have a language and jargon unto themselves, or any other such subculture.