Language in the news: investigating representations of ‘Englishness’ usingWordSmith Tools

Abstract

It is not uncommon to hear linguists lamenting the misrepresentation of language whenever linguistic subjects are taken up by the media. Ironically, though, we have relatively little systematic understanding of the ways in which language is actually dealt with in, and by, those media. This paper describes a project that aimed to explore the ways in which themes relating to language and linguistics are represented in a corpus of articles gathered from two British newspapers, The Times and The Guardian. The software programme WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2004) was used to identify those ‘key’ keywords that were most likely to occur in conjunction with the node terms language, languages, linguistic and linguistics. The applied methodology, which combines a quantitative analysis of keyword lists, concordances and collocations with a qualitative, discourse-analytical approach, reveals a number of ways in which issues related to the English language are debated in this particular sector of the print media. As could be expected, statistically-derived linguistic data suggest that English is predominantly represented in terms of a monolithic standard. Deeper insight was given by a close collocational analysis, which demonstrated that representations of the English language further subdivide into six partially conflicting categories relating to abuse and victimisation (inferiority presupposition), and, to a considerably larger extent, to commodification, empowerment and fetishisation (superiority presupposition). The findings are explored in the context of recent debates within sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology on the representation of language, on the one hand, and the construction of language ideologies, on the other.