Language Subordination

Language is more than a way to communicate. It is an act of IDENTITY, an expression of who you are.

• Asking someone to give up the way that they speak is asking them to give up their identity
• drop their allegiances to people, and places, and things
• The NEW RACISM (Yoshino)
• in the wake of ever tightening anti-discrimination laws, language and accent have become an acceptable excuse to publicly criticize, refuse to recognize and turn away those who do not speak standard.
• can't be racist, but can not hire someone because they speak black vernacular

Language and Ideology

• Foucault
• "any system of education is a political way of maintaining or modifying the appropriation of discourses, along with the knowledges and powers which they carry"
• formal initiation into linguistic prejudices (school)
• non-standard speaker consent and become complicit in th propaganda against their own interests
• the things they learn about their nonstandard language make them unhappy and uncomfortable
• the things they promise will improve if they give up nonstandard are seductive
• money, success, recognition, upward mobility
• Process
• language is mystified
• learning takes expert guidance and instruction
• authority is claimed
• we write well, we are experts who have studied. we will teach
• misinformation is generated
• your usage is inaccurate on historical, aesthetic and logical grounds
• targeted languages are trivialized
• your language is homey, quaint, ignorant, has narrow usage
• conformers are held up as positive examples
• if you conform you will go far...look at Danny
• non-conformers are vilified and marginalized
• willfully stupid, arogant, uniformed and deviant
• explicit promises are made
• employers will take you seriously, doors will open
• threats are made
• doors will remain closed, no one will take you seriously

The Individual's role in communication

• the "space" between two communicators is rarely neutral. It is usually colored by ideology
• CHOICES in COMMUNICATION (two way collaborative method)
• Clark: Principle of mutual responsibility
• the burden is conversation is usually on the listener, since they have to decipher meaning. The listener may choose to put more or less EFFORT into the decoding of meaning based on sociological and cultural factors 
• DECISIONS
• whether or not to participate
• intercultural competence is crucial to successful communication
• underlying motivation, hostility, solidarity, etc.
• interlocutors will work harder to find a communicative middle ground and foster mutual ineligibility when they are MOTIVATED socially and psychologically to do so.
• when it is perceived that doing so will afford a disadvantage, speakers will stop cooperating (no motivation)
• breakdown of communication is due to the NEGATIVE SOCIAL EVALUATION, not the accent in question=rejection of "communicative burden".
• the accents we hear go through LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY FILTERS
• we might totally reject the need to try to understand if the ideological value is low enough

What are some of the social valuations of the codes in our culture? Idiolect?