32.1667, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; General Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Gal, Irvine (2019)

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Subject: 32.1667, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; General Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Gal, Irvine (2019)

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Date: Wed, 12 May 2021 17:41:32
From: Katharina Tyran [katharina.tyran at univie.ac.at]
Subject: Signs of Difference

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1885.html

AUTHOR: Susan  Gal
AUTHOR: Judith T. Irvine
TITLE: Signs of Difference
SUBTITLE: Language and Ideology in Social Life
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Katharina Klara Tyran

SUMMARY

Two distinguished linguistic anthropologists, Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine,
present with their recent publication “Signs of difference. Language and
Ideology in Social Life” a book on their ongoing academic collaboration. As
the title suggests, Gal’s and Irvine’s focus is on differentiation as a
condition of language and linguistic practices, and they approach ideologies
as semiotic processes causing specific framings. More concretely, the book
questions how difference is understood in language and social life, how
differences are noticed, selected, and constructed in their social meaning and
embedded in discourses. The authors are drawing on their extensive research on
language and linguistic practice from an ethnographic angle in Africa, Europe,
and the United States. The book is organized in four sections, focusing on
‘Ethnography’ in Part I, ‘Semiotics’ in II, ‘Sites’ in Part III and ‘Pasts’ in
Part IV, which are headed by an introductory chapter. 

Their introduction Gal and Irvine open up with brief ‘exhibits’, exemplifying
differentiation and further important topics for their study, for example
notions of distinct linguistic usage and practice discussing a humorous
phrasebook explaining how to ‘sound French’ and the construction of a specific
‘pirate sound’. Following these introductory examples illustrating their
stance, the authors present their notions of ideology, differentiation, and
culture, clearly focusing on these concepts as interconnected productive and
active actions, always drawing on signs. Here, it is Peirce’s conception of
such that is the underlying approach to Gal’s and Irvine’s work. But as his
focus was not so much on social aspects of signs, it is exactly the expansion
of Peirce’s semiotics to social actors which is the important twist of this
volume, as “people construct and deploy their own versions with materials that
are socially available,” as Gal and Irvine state (2019: 17). They furthermore
present four aspects of semiotic processes that are essential to their
analysis of differentiation: rhematization, axis of differentiation, fractal
recursivity, and erasure.  

In Part I, both authors present two case studies under the heading of
‘Ethnography’, which are geographically quite distinct, – Senegal and Hungary
–, but nevertheless both explore ideological work, how differences are
performed and as such trigger social relations and linguistic practices.
Judith T. Irvine is widely recognized with her work on Wolof in Senegal, which
is here presented as a first case study. Importantly, her research, which is 
mostly conducted in the and 1970s and 1980s, is here elaborated in a new
context, discussing language performance, their ideological embedding and
distribution, according to the overall topic of the book. Wolof linguistic
practices include a very specific act of differentiation, as the rural
community separates townspeople by their registers into ‘nobles’ (géer) and
‘griots’ (gewel), which not only identifies two different ways of speaking,
but also ideologically two opposite social groups. As the discussion shows,
register contrast on various linguistic levels, such as prosody, phonology,
morphology, and syntax, are presented as iconic representations among the
rural Wolof community by rhematization, and picked up for ideological
construction. However, depending on circumstances, such registers might be
used by any speakers of Wolof, with recursive structures organizing
conversations and therefore proposing a scheme of differentiation, not only
drawing on social groups, but rather on social positioning, and varying also
due to interlocutors and the purpose of a conversation. The second case study
presents Susan Gal’s studies among German-speakers in southwestern Hungary,
where in prewar times two local expressions of German were strongly linked to
metapragmatic labels and categorizations, differentiating artisans and
farmers. Importantly, neither of these two linguistic expressions with
numerous shibboleths in phonology, morphology, lexis and pragmatics,
corresponds with literary or standard German. Rather, farmers’ speech was
marked as ‘authentic’ or more genuine, whereas artisans supposedly spoke
‘beautiful’, meaning more cultivated, elegant, and sophisticated. Neither,
however, was marked as ‘correct’. Their structure of differentiation, yet was
essential regarding structuring not only linguistic practices, but also social
life, which was strongly organized alongside the two categories of ‘artisans’
and ‘farmers’, of ‘us’ and ‘them’; and such differentiation was maintained and
reenacted in various contexts. With political changes during the 20th century,
and European ethnonationalism and monolingual paradigms, however, new opposing
categories occurred and erased the elder differentiation. Now, the linguistic
boundary alongside German and Hungarian became more decisive than a
distinction of the two local German varieties. 

The following Part II, ‘Semiotics’, is dedicated to the discussion of more
abstract concepts and aims to explore the semiotic process of differentiation
in three chapters. In the first chapter, the authors discuss signs,
conjectures, and perspectives as ingredients of language ideological work,
strongly incorporating Peirce’s work on semiotics. They specifically draw on
perspectives as main ingredients of ideologies and discuss how such
perspectives are developed out of sign relations, which are, as Gal and Irvine
argue, human-made and embedded in cultural premises. The following chapter
focuses on comparison as a semiotic process of differentiation, which is, as
the authors state, ideologically shaped. Exemplified with an early 19th
century travelogue through America, Gal and Irvine discuss spatial ideologies
of social and linguistic variation, specifically emphasizing axes as schema of
contrast. Here, they analyze the creation of a ‘western’ and an ‘eastern’
image in nineteenth-century US, an image of complementary qualities, including
ways of speaking, habits, behaviors, appearance. Such axes are rhematized and
necessarily entail contrasts and ideologically shaped comparison, which may,
however, change, even though they often seem stable and fixed. The third
chapter in Part II builds upon the previous and opens with a further example
from the US in past times – the notion of ‘Yankee’. Here, Gal and Irvine
examine how existing axes shape new situations. They further discuss how the
geographic contrast of stereotypes shifted in salience to ‘race’ as a concept
of differentiation and trace ideological changes reorganizing social relations
up to present times. 

Part III focuses on ‘Sites’ and deliberates analytical strategies on
ideological work regarding language and communication. In a first chapter
here, the authors draw on several scholars discussing where to look for
ideologies of language and communication and how to grasp ideological work.
Gal and Irvine propose the concept of ‘site’ to include multiple gazes, views,
and positions. They draw again specifically on Peirce’s notion of signs and
highlight how any phenomenon may become such a site of ideology, if it becomes
the focus of interpretative attention. This notion is exemplified with an
example from academic surroundings, namely renovations in a university
building, including the installation of glass doors, with ideological
interpretations about communicative practices among academy members arising,
depending on their  ‘door-politics’ (either open or closed) and whether they
covered transparent door elements or not. The following chapter puts
connections of such ideological sites in focus and discusses processes of
authorization, regimentation and institutionalization of sites. Gal and Irvine
identify various forms of such a connection. Here again, they present case
studies, this time discussing for instance city slogans in Baltimore and
reactions and comments following, connecting it also with current racial
tensions, but also institutionalization of grassroots-movements exemplified by
their flyers as semiotic artefacts. The last chapter in this section, finally,
is dedicated to scales and scale making as forms of comparison among sites,
also building upon semiotics and ideology. Such scales, the authors argue, are
relational practices, which need to be investigated in terms of which
qualities are seen as scalable by whom . Scale-making therefore must be
understood as perspectival, in the context of changing points of view. Here,
Gal and Irvine discuss, for instance, labeling and bounding of linguistic
forms in the context of standard language ideology.

Part IV, ‘Pasts’ certainly is the briefest with only one chapter examining
ideologies in linguistic research of the 19th century. As Gal and Irvine
argue, their newly developed concepts open up new perspectives on bygone times
and show ideological work of linguists in the past. Their focus here is the
scholarly difficulty of evidence and methodology in the 19th century, more
concretely how to examine unwritten language forms with philological
approaches common at that time. Again, both authors merge their previous foci
of research and examine two linguists actually writing on different languages
on different continents, which, however, had much in common: Robert Needham
Cust working on African languages and Pál Hunfalvy, specializing in Hungarian
and Finno-Ugric languages. Both allegedly met in 1881 at the International
Orientalist Congress in Berlin. Gal and Irvine now discuss ideologies and
semiotics of differentiation underlying Cust’s and Hunfalvy’s representations
of social and linguistic material, which, undoubtedly, also shaped practices
and relationships among their groups of interest. In their essay, Gal and
Irvine trace academic work broadly in the context of the 19th century,
including several linguists whose work fundamentally impacted the development
of linguistics at that time, and critically discuss Cust’s and Hunfalvy’s work
in specific approaches of that time, such as the biological interpretation of
linguistic genealogy, the predilection of mapping and boundaries, as well as
standard language ideologies emerging as an Eurocentric view, also in
combination with national projects and ideas.

In a final ‘Coda’, the authors emphasize offering “conceptual tools and ways
of exploring empirical material, whatever those materials might be” (2019:
270). The research strategy builds upon determining and focusing one
centerpiece and tracing connections from it in several directions, aiming for
the ideological work included and important to an axis of differentiation.
Importantly, Gal’s and Irvine’s analysis shows that any contrast might be
chosen and transferred into a category or a boundary, which then can open
ground for practices, institutions and organizations. Such differences need to
be investigated ideologically and semiotically, or regarding explanations and
qualities ascribed to signs and objects. Boundaries drawing on such
differences, obviously, might also be questioned and unmade again, which,
however, may cause new and even more categories. 

EVALUATION

Gal’s and Irvine’s study definitely stimulates academic discussions by
presenting a broad selection of case studies and by posing numerous questions.
The book consists of various and heterogenous case studies – both spatially as
well as temporally – some of them even conducted in a distant past. This might
seem problematic at the outset. The authors, however, manage to take up and
interconnect those diverse analyses on several points among the chapters and
to rethink and recontextualize their previous research. As they state
themselves in the final Coda, their selection might seem selective and
illustrative, but all approve their overall idea, namely how ideology and
semiotics need to be combined in investigating signs of difference, with
differentiation being ubiquitous in social life and linguistic practice. The
book is readable and very well  written, using vivid language with striking
examples, metaphors and metonymies to illustrate and emphasize stances and
angles. This makes Gal’s and Irvine’s volume not only important to academics
and faculty of various linguistic subdisciplines, but also worthwhile for
graduate and PhD students. It furthermore encourages readers to trace, find
and precisely question contrasts, distinctions, connections, and signs of
differentiation,  so important in our everyday existence.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Katharina Tyran is a university assistant (post-doc) of Slavic philology at
the Department of Slavonic Studies of the University of Vienna. She holds a
PhD from Humboldt-University of Berlin with a work on language codification
processes and identification attitudes in the Burgenland Croatian community,
with a cross-border perspective. Her research interests cover sociolinguistic
topics with a focus on minority languages, language and identity, border
studies, linguistic landscape research, and script linguistics. Currently, she
is working on a new research project with a focus on discourses on and visual
implications of writing systems in a south Slavic context.<br />Email:
katharina.tyran at univie.ac.at





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