Linguistic Habitus Research Articles

Towards a Bourdieuian Understanding of the South Asian Language Minorities’ Language Acquisition in Hong Kong

The inadequacy of Chinese language skills of the South Asian language minorities has raised concerns among educators and policymakers in recent years. Further to the notification given by the Equal Opportunities Commission to the Education Bureau of its concerns about the education of language-minority students, the provision of educational support to them became one of the priorities in the Initiatives of the 2014 Policy Address of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government. This study adopts habitus as a research method to gain a deeper understanding on the South Asian language minorities' language acquisition in Hong Kong. Whilst there are a number of initiatives to enhance the teaching and learning of Chinese for language-minority students, in this study I work closely with a group of six language minorities who studied in and graduated from the most historical designated school in Hong Kong. In attempting to understand the complexities of language practices and strategies employed by the participants to cope with their language needs in Hong Kong, I draw heavily from Bourdieu's notions of symbolic power, habitus, capital and field. The study uncovers the familial and linguistic habitus of the participants. All of them were multilingual speakers with various degrees of proficiency. Socioeconomic status appeared to have an effect on the motive for the student participants to re/produce Chinese language as their cultural capital. Meanwhile, Chinese language in terms of Cantonese was much valued by the graduate participants when they had opportunities to interact with their Chinese counterparts after they had left the designated school. The acquisition of Chinese language among the South Asian language minorities presents an interesting issue for those working in the educational field. Lacking primary familial and linguistic habitus of Chinese, the language minorities rely heavily and even entirely on the schools to help them cultivate their linguistic habitus of Chinese. I draw specifically from the relational notions of habitus and field to argue that the language minorities' linguistic habitus of Chinese can only be inculcated effectively through exposures and immersion in arenas where the Chinese counterparts are located.

Pierre Bourdieu: mercados linguísticos e poder simbólico

Neste artigo, são apresentadas algumas das principais categorias utilizadas por Bourdieu para pensar a complexidade do processo de comunicação, tais como: habitus linguístico, senso de aceitabilidade e de oportunidade, capital simbólico, mercado e poder simbólico. A partir delas, pretende-se demonstrar que a comunicação não se dá pela simples troca de signos - sujeitos a codificação e decodificação. Essa troca é envolvida por signos de autoridade (o valor que cada fala assume na situação) e signos de poder (relações de autoridade entre os falantes). A escolha das fontes jornalísticas - as vozes que ouvimos nos noticiários - e o modo pelo qual são formadas as esferas públicas dependem diretamente dessas condições.

The symbolic reach of the Catholic Church: liturgy-based language among atheists and Catholics in Poland

ABSTRACTThe power of the Catholic Church in Poland can be seen throughout modern Polish history. It can also be observed in the influence of the Catholic clergy on political and social life in Poland. But how far-reaching is this power? Does it only concern the Catholic majority in Polish society or does it extend also to the atheist minority? In this article, we address this question through a study of the linguistic habitus of two groups (Polish Catholics and Polish atheists), specifically an analysis of conceptual metaphors in a corpus compiled from web forums. We examine the frequencies of three metaphors concerning love, death and sin previously identified in Catholic transition rituals, such as baptisms or weddings. The results show no quantitative differences in the usage of these metaphors and instead significant qualitative similarities in the language form of the metaphors. The findings thus suggest the ability of the Catholic Church to influence the ways of speaking and possibly also of thinking and acting among both Catholics and atheists in Poland.

Parallelism and the Composition of Oral Narratives in Banda Eli

While parallelism is easily recognizable as the source for various literary tropes, it is also important as a resource for the speakers' dialogic engagement with the patterns of interaction and experience: they embody part of their linguistic habitus. This article explores the forms of parallelism found in a variety of speech and narrative genres in Bandanese, an Eastern Indonesian minority language with about 5,000 speakers. Bandanese abounds with parallel expressions in which speakers use part-whole relations based on social and cultural classifications to construct totalizing cognitive and value statements. At the same time, Bandanese poetics is more than just evidence of an integrated cultural world. The article analyzes interactions between tropes based on repetition and parallelism to suggest that speakers and narrators use them to create a resonance between immediate rhetorical effects and larger recognized aesthetic positions in their folk categories. A prominent example of such resonance is the use of parallelism in eloquent, public speech. When speakers use the lexical contrast between Bandanese and the regional or national majority language as a source of parallel expressions, they draw from an aesthetic in which powerful speech resonates with past and future dialogue with outsiders. Recent scholarship on parallelism and repetition encourages us to recognize that they produce potential dialogic relations on a larger scale than that of single utterances. This approach can produce valuable insights into possibilities for innovation in and revitalization of Bandanese and other minority languages threatened by demographic change and loss of use in their former domains.

College Chinese Heritage Language Learners’ Implicit Knowledge of Compound Sentences

This preliminary study investigates beginning college Chinese heritage language learners (CHLLs)’ implicit knowledge of compound sentences with pairs of correlatives. Drawing on Valdés’s (2005) categorization of HLLs as L1 speakers and HLLs as L1/L2 users, the study examines CHLLs’ ability to comprehend compound sentences with pairs of correlatives, as well as their comprehension level as compared to native Chinese language speakers and Chinese foreign language learners (CFLLs). The study also examines the characteristics of CHLLs’ implicit knowledge of compound sentences. The data was collected using an acceptability judgment task. The CHL subjects’ overall performance was somewhere between that of native speakers and CFLLs who had studied Chinese for two years. Their performance shows that their comprehension of compound sentences acquired before the onset of learning English at the age of 4 or 5 was retained and even somewhat developed. This is because CHL subjects still received some amount of input from home and community Chinese schools even though they favored English over Chinese. The findings on CHLLs’ linguistic habitus can inform and frame CHLLappropriate pedagogies that exploit their implicit knowledge and systematically build on it.

MATH HABITUS, THE STRUCTURING OF MATHEMATICAL CLASSROOM PRACTICES, AND POSSIBILITIES FOR TRANSFORMATION

In this paper, I discuss the social philosopher Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, and use it to locate and examine dispositions in a larger constellation of related concepts, exploring their dynamic relationship within the social context, and their construction, manifestation, and function in relation to classroom mathematics practices. I describe the main characteristics of habitus that account for its invisible effects: its embodiment, its deep and pre-reflective internalization as schemata, orientation, and taste that are learned and yet unthought, and are subsumed by our practices, which we understand as something that “goes without saying.” I also propose that, similarly to Bourdieu’s concept of linguistic habitus, a math habitus is made up of a complex intertwining of collective and individual histories that turn into “nature,” which structure all individual and collective action and inform mathematical classroom practice. I suggest that individual math dispositions may be liable to reconstruction through the reconstruction of the collective math habitus, which follows from opening spaces for dialogue, problematization and reconstruction of the unthought categories of the doxa. This requires that students acquire new concrete and symbolic means with which to challenge their current sense of mathematics as a discipline, and mathematical practice tout court. Finally, I argue that community of inquiry, employed as a pedagogical model, provides an avenue for both: for opening those spaces for reflective dialogical inquiry into concepts and questions whose meanings and references have so far been taken for granted, and for acquiring critical thinking and dialogical skills and dispositions that are a necessary means for participating in such reflective inquiry that offers significant promise for reconstructing individual and collective habitus in school settings.

‘No French, no more’: language-based exclusion in North America's first professional accounting association, 1879–1927

1This paper draws on Bourdieu's sociolinguistic theory to interpret the overrepresentation of Anglophone accountants vis-à-vis Francophone comptables in the formative years of North America's first professional accounting association. In a linguistic market, where English was taken for granted as the official language of commerce, we find that the founding members of the Association of Accountants in Montreal (AAM) possessed a ‘distinctive’ cultural and linguistic habitus. We observe that the AAM enacted for many years a number of exclusion strategies to effectively limit its admittance of Francophone compatibles who possessed a different cultural and linguistic habitus. When the AAM eventually did explicitly embrace Francophone memberships, this was in order to counter the threat of a rival accounting designation.

A critical commentary on the discourse of language rights in the Naivasha language policy in Sudan using habitus as a method

This article uses Bourdieu's theory of practice to discuss the discourse of language rights in the Naivasha language policy in Sudan. The article argues that understanding language as a form of practice inseparable from the whole class habitus leads to the avoidance of any monothetic and totalizing discourses that treat language as a self-sufficient code. Instead, it argues for a recognition of the temporality and multidirectionality of language framed in a broad (critical) ethnographic sense. It contends that the statement of language rights in the Naivasha language policy cannot sanctify local languages as media of education unless it addresses the possibilities of creating the economic and social conditions for their use. It is these historical conditions that provide a value to the linguistic habitus of the subjugated groups in the Sudan. The endeavor invites a rethinking of the relationship in language rights campaigns between the academic habitus of linguists and the practical habitus of members of communities. The article concludes by arguing that any technical linguistic activities under the banner of Naivasha language policy that are not informed by the practicalities of everyday life are alienating; hence, they remain reproductive of the existing unequal power relations.

Practicing Sociological Imagination Through Writing Sociological Autobiography

Sociological imagination is a quality of mind that cannot be adopted by simply teaching students its discursive assumptions. Rather, it is a disposition, in competition with other forms of sensibility, which can be acquired only when it is practiced. Adhering to this important pedagogical assumption, students were assigned to write their sociological autobiography. While in the process of establishing a connection between their biography and social history, students were encouraged to narrate their life stories using sociological language. After completing the project, they were asked to comment on their work. Student responses show the positive dimensions involved (including unintended therapeutic consequences) and the major hurdles that they experienced in executing the assignment. In the latter case, the major problem was writing a sociological autobiography qualitatively distinct from what might be referred to as “plain autobiography.” Results reinforce the idea that sociological instruction is better handled when sociological imagination is viewed as a linguistic habitus which serves both as a medium of communication and an intellectual instrument of looking at the social world.

Learning the ‘linguistic habitus’ of a politician

In this essay, I analyze the changes that were brought to the handwritten draft of the first political address that Ben Ali, the current president of Tunisia (then the newly appointed Prime Minister), delivered on November 7, 1987 across the airwaves, to announce the deposition of President Bourguiba (1956–1987), and to proclaim himself the successor of the deposed ‘old’ and ‘sick’ president. Through the description and linguistic analysis of some excerpts, I demonstrate how the linguistic changes capture the processes whereby the new ‘presidential’ voice and discursive authority are being crafted in front of our eyes and how the speaker is being initiated, linguistically and pragmatically, into how and when to appropriate “the colloquy of other voices” (Farmer 1995: 318), their discourses and words, and how and when to subtly speak their own voice and words while respecting the pragmatics of appropriateness and appropriation, i.e. norms of what can be said, what cannot be stated or acknowledged, and what can be appropriated and how and when it can be appropriated in order to find a balance between competing voices (Bakhtin 1986), words, and linguistic habituses (Bourdieu 1991). By the same token, the analysis explores the intricate interweaving of text and discourse regulation, valuation of forms of speaking and styles of speaking, and political ideology. The analysis of the linguistic changes offers fertile ground to conceptualize ways to bridge the gap between the micro-analysis of linguistic patterns and the macro-processes of social and political factors, knowing that “much of the meaning and hence communicative value that linguistic forms have for their speakers lies in the ‘indexical’ connections between the linguistic signs and the contextual factors of their use” (Kroskrity 2000:7).

Literacy Instruction, Disciplinary Practice, and Diverse Learners: a Case Study

This article presents a close analysis of a reading group in a first-grade class of Spanish-dominant Latina/o children established through the English-only mandate of California’s Proposition 227. First, I discuss how the practice of the reading group was shaped by the intersection of socio-political and institutional discourses and practices. Next, I present findings that demonstrate that the reading group functioned in problematic ways to construct the children as individuals who were responsible for their own cognitive-academic performances; to evaluate and rank the children by these performances; and to reconstruct their bodily and linguistic habitus in the image of a disciplined literate subject.

Marginalization and symbolic violence in a world of differences: war and parallels to nursing practice.

Marginalization has been used as a guiding concept for nursing research, theory and practice. Its properties have been identified and updated in 1994 and 1999, respectively. This article re-examines marginalization, considering it to be a concept that changes with pivotal historical events. The events of September 11, 2001, and the war between the US/UK and Iraq are such pivotal events. The notion of the linguistic habitus and symbolic violence as outlined by Bourdieu provide new insights about the dynamics of marginalization. Specifically noted is the marginalization of persons and cultures based on their designation by the current US administration, and as interpreted through mainstream media, as actual or potential 'terrorists'. A parallel situation in nursing is discussed, beginning with nursing's own marginality, related to the dynamics of symbolic violence. Nursing is argued to be vulnerable to having essential words and practices co-opted by dominant institutions and altered in meaning, that is, made incongruent with the discipline's emphasis on core values of confidentiality, equity and care. In response to marginalization and exteriorization those affected can use voice and testimony to 'recreate the centre'. Suggestions for protecting our practices and philosophy are included.

Doxa and deliberation

Recent democratic theorists have drawn on the work of the late Pierre Bourdieu to make the case that patterned inequalities in the social capacity to engage in deliberation can undermine deliberative theory’s democratic promise. They have proposed a range of deliberative democratic responses to the problem of cultural inequality, from enabling the marginalised to adopt the communicative dispositions of the dominant, to broadening the standards that define legitimate deliberation, to strengthening deliberative counter‐publics. The author interprets Bourdieu’s theory of the linguistic habitus to prompt an even more radical critique of deliberative democracy than these theorists acknowledge, one to which the proposed solutions fail adequately to respond. Her argument suggests that empirical work on deliberative democracy should expand to address specifically the problems of cultural inequality that Bourdieu’s work highlights.

"I've Called 'em Tom-ah-toes All My Life and I'm Not Going to Change!": Maintaining Linguistic Control Over English Identity in the U.S.

This article explores how national identities are constructed through language by examining the accent negotiations of a group of white English immigrants to the US. Pointing to the anxiety that any Americanization of their accents engendered, I show how individuals cope with claiming an identity that seems to be undermined by their speech style. They negotiated this contradiction in two ways: first, they feared that an invisible audience of English people would unmask them as not properly English; and second, they used distancing mechanisms — namely, sarcasm, disgust, anxiety about disloyalty, and a recourse to physicality — to distance themselves from the Americanisms that crept into their linguistic habitus. These mechanisms allowed the immigrants to maintain their sense of Englishness even when they did not sound English.

Discourse genres in a theory of practice

In order to analyze language use within a theory of social practice, it is necessary to develop a coherent approach to speech genres. This paper contributes to such an approach, by treating genres as elements of linguistic habitus, consisting of stylistic, thematic, and indexical schemata on which actors improvise in the course of linguistic production. The empirical focus is “official” Maya language documents produced in 16th‐century colonial Yucatan. The rise of novel discourse genres in colonial society was part of the emergence of new, hybrid forms of action. [Mesoamerica, Maya, discourse analysis, social practice]

The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and the Internalization of Language

In this statement from The Order of Things, Michel Foucault speaks of the nineteenth-century revolution in linguistics that, in effect, rediscovered language and made it the object of systematic study in its own right. Language, no longer seen as a transparent medium, was granted "its own particular density ... and laws of its own."' Yet it is not self-evident how we are made more free by understanding that words are not just a repository of knowledge. The density of language is a troublesome postulate. That postulate, according to Foucault, raises difficult epistemological problems and presents theorists with a choice: