Approaches to Language Ideology

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the methods that have traditionally been used to study language ideologies in the media, as well as the methods that have been applied more recently. Emerging from the rich findings of ethnographic data by linguistic anthropologists from the USA (e.g. Schieffelin et al. (Eds.). Language ideologies. Practice and theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), language ideology theory has since been applied in folk linguistics, language education, and language policy. More recently, researchers have begun applying language ideology theories in corpus linguistics research as a way of supplementing existing discourse analysis research (e.g. Fitzsimmons-Doolan 2009; Using lexical variables to identify language ideologies in a policy corpus 9(1): 57–82, 2014; Moschonas and Spitzmuller 2010). This chapter details how corpus linguistics and discourse analysis can be usefully combined in the study of language ideologies and the media across two languages.