Language ideology

Abstract

This special issue of hagmarl'cs derives from a day-long symposium on l^anguage Ideology: Practice and Theory held at the annual meeting of the American Anthropology Association in Chicago, November 1991.1 The organizing premise of the symposium was that ideology is a mediating link between social structures and forms of talk, if such static imagery for some very dynamic processes can be forgiven. Rather than casting ideology as an epiphenomenon, a relatively inconsequential overlay of secondary and tertiary responses (Boas 1911; Bloomfield 1944),, the symposium started from the proposition that ideology stands in dialectical relation with, and thus significantly influences, social, discursive, and practices. As such a critical link, ideology merits more concerted analytic attention than it has thus far been given. In this first attempt to bring form to an area of inquiry, we have adopted a relatively unconstrained sense of ideology. Alan Rumsey's definition, based on Silverstein (1979), is a useful starting point: ideologies are shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of in the world (1990: 346). We mean to include cultural conceptions not only of and variation, but of the nature and purpose of communication, and of communicative behavior as an enactment of a collective order (Silverstein 1987: l-2). I use the terms linguistic and language ideology interchangeably, although in the articles that follow one might detect differences in their uses, perhaps varying with the degree to which the authors focus on formal structures or on representations of a collective order. In order to build toward a general understanding of the cultural variability of ideology and its role in social and life, the symposium brought