Taking off from the apt epigram that "... language, after all, is a purely historical phenomenon", these sociolinguistic analyses present debates over how language ideologies are formed, articulated, and entextualized. The editor's opening and final essays entitled "the debate is open" and "the debate is closed" bookend ten debates relating to language, identity, and political power: French-into-Corsican translations, dialect in Switzerland, Catalan vs. Spanish in Barcelona since the 1992 Olympics, Canada's linguistic cultures, bilingual education in the US, Ebonics, Singapore's "Speak Mandarin' campaign, the revival status of Israeli Hebrew, and European tongues and literary genres in postcolonial Africa.

The study of language ideologies has become a key theme in sociolinguistics over the past decade. It is the study of the relationship between representations of language, on the one hand, and broader aesthetic, economic, moral and political concerns, on the other. Research into the particular role played by media discourse in the construction, reproduction and contestation of such ideologies has been widely scattered - this book brings together this emerging field. It considers how, in an era of global communication technologies, the media - by which we understand the press, radio, television, cinema, the internet and multimodal gaming - help to disseminate preferred uses of, and ideas about, language. The book is tightly focussed on the relationship between language ideologies and media discourse, together with the methods and techniques required for the analysis of that relationship. It also places emphasis on television and new-media texts, incorporating and expanding upon recent theoretical insights into visual communication and multimodal discourse analysis. International in scope, this book will also be of interest to students from a wide range of fields including linguistics (particularly sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology), modern languages, education, media studies, communication studies and cultural theory.

How does a country find itself 'at war' over spelling? This book focuses on a crucial juncture in the post-communist history of the Czech Republic, when an orthographic commission with a moderate reformist agenda found itself the focus of enormous public controversy. Delving back into history, Bermel explores the Czech nation's long tradition of intervention and its association with the purity of the language, and how in the twentieth century an ascendant linguistic school - Prague Functionalism - developed into a progressive but centralizing ideology whose power base was inextricably linked to the communist regime. Bermel looks closely at the reforms of the 1990s and the heated public reaction to them. On the part of language regulators, he examines the ideology that underlay the reforms and the tactics employed on all sides to gain linguistic authority, while in dissecting the public reaction, he looks both at conscious arguments marshaled in favor of and against reform and at the use, conscious and subconscious, of metaphors about language. Of interest to faculty and students working in the area of language, cultural studies, and history, especially that of transitional and post-communist states, this volume is also relevant for those with a more general interest in language planning and language reform. The book is awarded with the "The George Blazyca Prize in East European Studies 2008".

In The Ideological Structure of Linguistic Theory Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith provide a revisionist account of the development of ideas about semantics in modern theories of language, focusing particularly on Chomsky's very public rift with the Generative Semanticists about the concept of Deep Structure.

The first systematic survey of the language planning and language policy discourse of major Arabic language academies.

This systematic introduction to the concept of point of view in language explores the ways in which point of view intersects with and is shaped by ideology. It specifically focuses on the way in which speakers and writers linguistically encode their beliefs, interests and biases in a wide range of media. The book draws on an extensive array of linguistic theories and frameworks and each chapter includes a self-contained introduction to a particular topic in linguistics, allowing easy reference. The author uses examples from a variety of literary and non-literary text types such as, narrative fiction, advertisements and newspaper reports.

Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions redefines the critical picture of language as a system of signs and ideological tropes inextricably linked to human existence. Offering reflections on the status, discursive possibilities, and political, ideological and practical uses of oral or written word in both contemporary society and the work of previous thinkers, this book traverses South African courts, British clinics, language schools in East Timor, prison cells, cinemas, literary criticism textbooks and philosophical treatises in order to forge a new, diversified perspective on language, ideology, and what it means to be human. This truly international and interdisciplinary collection explores the implications that language, always materialising in the form of a historically and ideologically identifiable discourse, as well as the concept of ideology itself, have for the construction, definition and ways of speaking about 'the human'. Thematically arranged and drawing together the latest research from experts around the world, Language, Ideology, and the Human offers a view of language, ideology and the human subject that eschews simplifications and binary definitions. With contributions from across the social sciences and humanities, this book will appeal to scholars from a range of disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, law, linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and political science.

This text considers contemporary China’s language ideology and how it supports China as a rising global power player. It examines the materialization of this ideology as China’s language order unfolds on two front, promoting Putonghua domestically and globally, alongside its economic growth and military expansion. Within the conceptual framework of language ideology and language order and using PRC policy documents, education annals, and fieldwork, this book explores how China’s language ideology is related to its growing global power as well as its domestic and global outreaches. It also addresses how this ideology has been materialized as a language order in terms of institutional development and support, and what impact these choices are having on China and the world. Focusing on the relationship between language ideology and language order, the book highlights a closer and coherent linguistic association between China’s domestic drive and global outreach since the turn of the century.

In Corsica, spelling contests, road signs, bilingual education bills and Corsican language newscasts leave language planners and ordinary speakers deeply divided over how to define what "counts" as Corsican and how it is connected with cultural identity. In Ideologies in Action Alexandra Jaffe explores the complex interrelationship between linguistic ideologies and practices on the French island of Corsica. This detailed exploration of the ideological and political underpinnings of three decades of language planning raises fundamental questions about what it means to "save" a minority language, and the way in which specific cultural, political and ideological contexts shape the "successes" and "failures" of linguistic engineering efforts. Jaffe's ethnography focuses both on the way dominant language ideologies are inscribed in the everyday experience of ordinary people, as well as how they shape the evolving strategies of language planners trying to revitalize the Corsican language. While Jaffe's analysis demonstrates the pervasive influence of dominant language ideologies on minority language speakers and language planners, she also draws on case studies from everyday discourse, educational practice and public and mediatized debates over language issues to develop an ethnographically-grounded perspective on levels of resistance. In the final part of the book she explores the emergence (and the limits) of "radical" genres of resistance found in forms of Corsican language activism and in examples of codeswitching and language mixing in bilingual radio practice. This book contributes to a growing literature on language ideology, and will be of interest to anthropologists, political scientists and linguists interested in the practical and theoretical dimensions of language contact, minority language literacy, bilingual education, and language shift.