The Nine Lives of "Linguistic Deficiency"

Sat Feb 10 00:09:15 UTC 2007

This is getting very interesting, IMHO.

For convenience's sake, I'll use "we" for "typical North American
linguistic anthropologists," whatever that really means. Geoff Pullum
and other linguists tend to fall in "our" group. We tend to adopt
descriptive approaches to language yet think about the importance of
language-related education policies.
Similarly, "they" will refer to an amorphous group of individuals
involved in language-related educational policy. More specifically, a
large group of people who tend to hold prescriptivist views and, more
importantly, tend to overlook the importance of intra- and
inter-community linguistic diversity. Their intellectual ancestors
include those who prompted Labov to rebuke some preconceived ideas
about intelligence as well as those members of the late 18th century
French administration who left us with an unbearably rigid, normative
grammar.

I hate to draw artificial boundaries as much as the next academic and
I readily recognise that many people are members of both groups. Yet,
as with anything having to do with identity, "we" negotiate our
position by distancing ourselves from an imagined Other while
overlooking individual differences within "our" group.
Methodologically, it's not a bad model to follow, as a step in a
longer process. On a mailing-list, it makes a lot of sense.
I take most listmembers to either be "one of us" or to accept that we
may hold some specific views (descriptive, particularist...) about
language use.

Following up on Richard's post, answering Hal's...
> > 1.  Whether we like it or not, knowledge and skill with "standard"
> > language and orthography has "cash value", and trying to teach
> > teachers-to-be that it's just "all ideology" won't get far with them.
>
> I haven't seen any linguistic anthropologists who have been
> interested in language ideologies deny this point.
No. But maybe we're not always doing so great a job at getting them to
understand that what we do is not only compatible with the cash value
of normative language but, in fact, possibly a bit more efficient than
their attitude at helping people (students, children, employees,
immigrants...) reach language use norms.

> I don't see there being a single "ideology paradigm"; I've seen
> several schools of thought that deal with ideology or ideologies in
> very different ways, both in terms of theorizing and in methodologies
> in the field and lab.
Granted. And Woolard and Schieffelin's review article does show that diversity.
http://www.jstor.org/view/00846570/di980533/98p0151g/0
Yet, one thing I noticed when using that text in class is that, apart
from terminology, it assumes knowledge of (if not acquiescence with) a
mainline of arguments about social uses of language.

One issue for us, French-speakers, is that we don't always remember
how negative the connotations of "ideology" are for English-speakers.
There was a neat example of cross-linguistic misunderstanding due to
that term, on a French-speaking mailing-list during the 2004
presidential elections in the United States...

Which also implies, to me: our notion of "language ideology" is
relying on a somewhat Marxian set of presuppositions about dialectic
and critical thinking. Fair enough. But quite specific. And possibly
isolating us from them.

> Indeed.  Ideologies are (must be) "systems of ideas," not
> independent, unrelated notions.
Pretty holistic... ;-)

> I'm more interested in changing those mundane, quotidian ideas about
> language if and when I see them as parts of systems.
Which tends to be the case with education theory, IMHO.
That's actually why I keep using Yaguello's Catalogue as a reference.
It's quite useful at not only "debunking language myths" but also at
helping education students understand that "they too have ideology"
(that the set of their ideas about language is fairly consistent but
can be confronted with other ideas about language, especially if we're
to set out and create new educational programs).

> Well, it depends on what then follows.  "Standard languages are
> better than non-standard ones, therefore we must... [or mustn't....]
> It's what follows that tells us how large and powerful that
> particular ideology and what its implications are, and whether its
> worth attending to, resisting, supporting, or whatever.
Ditto!
Preconceived ideas about language and languages are one issue. The
fact that "they" (a group of people involved in language education
policy) hold some of these ideas is a second issue. The fact that
these ideas constitute a system (worldview-like, IMHO) is a third
issue. The "whack-a-mole" impossibility to change this ideological
system is a fourth issue. Yet the main issue for me, personally, is
that those of "them" involved in specific research projects (and, more
importantly, education policies) seem completely oblivious to what is
pretty much a consensus among European and North American academics
involved in language studies (languages are equivalently appropriate
for learning, scriptural norms are one possible set of norms, children
and teenagers can learn most of these norms irrespective of their
"class origins"...). "Our" consensus should be and is currently
challenged, but "they" rarely enter in any kind of dialogue with "us."

(Hal)
> > and positivism has also been sent to the trash heap
Because of anti-positivism, some people did throw the baby away with
the bath water, and there's something sad about it. What's neat is
that "we" include both the group of "massive amounts of reliable data"
sociolinguists and the group of "rich cultural insight" ethnographers.
Some of "us" do both.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/adolescent.ctr/Research/eckert.html

> When I teach about language ideologies in my university courses, I
> try to show my students how complex the issues are, the strengths and
> weaknesses of past and current studies, but I leave it to the
> students to decide for themselves where they want to take a stand, if
> any.  I'm more interested in *how* they draw upon (or develop new)
> linguistic methods and knowledge, and how they couple those with
> ethnographic methods and knowledge, so that having studied language
> this way, they can develop approaches to deal with all the new
> information they'll encounter (maybe even collect) long after I'm out
> of the picture.  And I sure hope their understandings eventually
> surpass the ones we have now!
"We" share that hope. Let's hope "they" do too.

Two additional points.
"Linguistic relativism," defined carefully, does appear to be a
keyword in this context. Unfortunately, "relativism" has been usurped
so we can't use it outside of "in-group" discussions
I appear to be lumping together very disconnected issues such as
policies regarding non-native speakers of English and language
snobbery on the part of the French Academy. Thing is, at the level of
analysis from which I'd like to look at the issue, those issues seem
to take part in a pretty consistent system of ideas. Maybe because
we're less diverse a group than we wish we were.

(Yes, I do hope more people will join in the fun...)

-- 
Alexandre
http://enkerli.wordpress.com/