Journal of Sociolinguistics 14/4, 2010: 539–566 BOOK REVIEWS MONICA HELLER. Linguistic Minorities and Modernity. 2nd edition (Advances in Sociolinguistics). 2006. London: Continuum. 233 pp. Pb (9780826486912) £27.99. Reviewed by CHRISTOF DEMONT-HENRICH Monica Heller’s Linguistic Minorities and Modernity (2nd edition) is a tightly written, well-researched and intellectually engaging analysis of a French- language high school in English-dominant Ontario, Canada. Heller skillfully situates a case study of L’ ´ Ecole Champlain, a public school for 400 students in grades 7–13 in Toronto, against a larger socio-historical and political backdrop. For example, early in the book we are provided with a concise and informative history of the historical and contemporary French experience in Canada. A bit later, Heller delivers an informative overview of the specific, and unique, provincial political conditions in play during the 1991–1994 time period in which her case study was conducted. The early 1990s is a rather long time ago. However, as Heller explains, many of the observations she offers apply today. Most notable of these is the intensification of a shift away from the linking of language to ethnic and national identity to the marriage of language to the instrumental logic of global capitalism. The contemporary relevance of the neo-liberalisation of language is clear. However, while this relevance makes the publication of a second edition of Linguistic Minorities and Modernity worthwhile, the book would be strengthened by adding a chapter which updates the reader on L’ ´ Ecole Champlain, the larger provincial context, the teaching of French in English-dominated Ontario, and, last, but not least, the individual social actors who serve as the primary focus of Heller’s thought-provoking and thoughtful case study. Heller’s major aims in Linguistic Minorities and Modernity include illustrating how sociolinguistics can contribute to discoveries about social change as well as about the relationship between agency and structure. Additionally, she seeks to show the role of language in construction of social difference and social inequality. She accomplishes all three of these. However, she is most successful at fulfilling the last goal. Theoretically, Heller draws heavily from Bourdieu, in particular from his ideas on linguistic and cultural capital as well as from the notion that much of social life is occupied by various groups’ struggle for legitimation. Methodologically, Heller employs what she calls ‘sociolinguistic ethnography.’ Among other things, this includes observations of classes, school events, interviews with school C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2010 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA
Transcript
Journal of Sociolinguistics 14/4, 2010: 539–566
BOOK REVIEWS
MONICA HELLER. Linguistic Minorities and Modernity. 2nd edition (Advances inSociolinguistics). 2006. London: Continuum. 233 pp. Pb (9780826486912)£27.99.
Reviewed by CHRISTOF DEMONT-HENRICH
Monica Heller’s Linguistic Minorities and Modernity (2nd edition) is a tightlywritten, well-researched and intellectually engaging analysis of a French-language high school in English-dominant Ontario, Canada. Heller skillfullysituates a case study of L’Ecole Champlain, a public school for 400 students ingrades 7–13 in Toronto, against a larger socio-historical and political backdrop.For example, early in the book we are provided with a concise and informativehistory of the historical and contemporary French experience in Canada. Abit later, Heller delivers an informative overview of the specific, and unique,provincial political conditions in play during the 1991–1994 time period inwhich her case study was conducted.
The early 1990s is a rather long time ago. However, as Heller explains, many ofthe observations she offers apply today. Most notable of these is the intensificationof a shift away from the linking of language to ethnic and national identity tothe marriage of language to the instrumental logic of global capitalism. Thecontemporary relevance of the neo-liberalisation of language is clear. However,while this relevance makes the publication of a second edition of LinguisticMinorities and Modernity worthwhile, the book would be strengthened by addinga chapter which updates the reader on L’Ecole Champlain, the larger provincialcontext, the teaching of French in English-dominated Ontario, and, last, butnot least, the individual social actors who serve as the primary focus of Heller’sthought-provoking and thoughtful case study.
Heller’s major aims in Linguistic Minorities and Modernity include illustratinghow sociolinguistics can contribute to discoveries about social change as wellas about the relationship between agency and structure. Additionally, she seeksto show the role of language in construction of social difference and socialinequality. She accomplishes all three of these. However, she is most successfulat fulfilling the last goal.
Theoretically, Heller draws heavily from Bourdieu, in particular from his ideason linguistic and cultural capital as well as from the notion that much of sociallife is occupied by various groups’ struggle for legitimation. Methodologically,Heller employs what she calls ‘sociolinguistic ethnography.’ Among other things,this includes observations of classes, school events, interviews with school
administrators, teachers, and students (46 of the 400 students at Champlainwere interviewed), and the analysis of various administrative and schooldocuments.
Heller opens the book by outlining what she views as a fundamental shift inthe politics of (linguistic) identity, from an old, nation-state, one-nation, one-language model, to a new one rooted in the conditions of hyper-modernity, orconditions increasingly characterised by the ideology of neoliberal, corporatecapitalism. This ever-encroaching ideology measures the value of everything –including multilingualism – by way of the logic of individual economicopportunism. Even authenticity itself – formally the primary grounds uponwhich Western, modern language ideologies have rested – has been reducedto a commodity to be bought and sold.
Heller does an excellent job of laying out her case for choosing L’EcoleChamplain in Chapter 1. Perhaps the most important factor which makes theschool a good choice is its liminality. That is, the school is a French-languageschool in an English-dominant context. Furthermore, it sits in an internationalcity with many immigrants whose own minority (language) status is layeredunderneath the minority status of French-speaking Canadians in Ontario, andin Canada.
Heller opens Chapter 2 with an interesting discussion and analysis of thehistory of the school’s name, its selection of a mascot, and its motto, which is‘unity in diversity.’ Heller scrutinises the school’s motto most often, zeroing inon its inherent contradictions and paradoxes.
In Chapter 3, Heller ‘discuss[es] the nature of the school’s linguistic ideologiesand their institutional history, notably with respect to French monolingualismand a focus on what is called la qualite de la langue (the quality of language)’(p. 66). She also ‘examine[s] forms of social organisation which make it possiblefor the school to produce and reproduce its linguistic ideologies’ (p. 66). Here,as elsewhere, Heller problematises the ideology of French monolingualism uponwhich Champlain is based.
Absent in Chapter 3 and in the book as a whole are some bigger-picturestatistics which would help give the reader even greater context than Hellerprovides. Among the statistics that would be helpful are: statistics on the totalnumber of French-language schools in Ontario at the time of the study; numberson the total number of students in those schools; as well as statistics on the studentenrollment in public, English-dominant schools in Ontario. More generally, itwould have been helpful for the reader to be given statistics on the gender aswell as racial and ethnic make-up at Champlain. Statistics on average class size,the size of the graduating class, and the numbers of students in each gradelevel would also have been nice to have. These sorts of information would aidthe reader in making better sense of, for instance, references to comments like‘classes with large number of Somalis in them’ (p. 55).
In Chapter 4, Heller considers the ways in which some students, notably thosein the advanced level track at Champlain, collaborate with the school’s norms
and sociolinguistic practices. She notes the ways in which their interests convergewith those of the school and she reflects on the fact that these privileged studentsvalue their own form of bilingualism over and above the French monolingualideal of the school. Unfortunately, Heller does not follow students beyond theschool. Without any information about what is going on, linguistically speaking,outside of the school, the reader has little sense of the larger context in whichwhat Heller calls the ‘performance of bilingualism’ is taking place. This means,for instance, that it is possible the reader might conclude that the only place inwhich most students view French as worthy of being consistently used is withinthe classrooms at Champlain.
Generally, it would be nice to see Heller situate what is going on within thehallways and classrooms at Champlain more clearly against the over-archinghegemony of English outside the school’s boundaries. This hegemony is relatedin many interesting, complex, and crucial ways to what is going on within theschool’s boundaries.
In Chapter 5, Heller moves to an interesting and revealing analysis ofhegemonic gender roles – adopted by the dominant students and activelycontested by many of the marginalised students – and how they contributeto and reinforce particular, hierarchical social relations at Champlain.
Chapter 6 chronicles a successful movement on the part of the school’spreviously marginalised ethnic and racial groups – most notably its majorimmigrant groups – to alter the ideological terrain of the school. Heller setsthis movement nicely against the larger context of a move toward multiculturalpolitics and ideology in Ontario in general and shows that there is some room –albeit limited room – for oppressed groups to alter the hegemonic contours of theschool.
Chapter 7 includes some brief normative observations about language andbilingualism by Heller, who, for the most part, spends the greater part of thebook trying to distance herself from these. For example, she acknowledges thatmembers of a counter-hegemonic ideology and movement must remain at leastpartially within the confines of the larger hegemonic rules of the game, or risklosing the game – in this case, the language game – altogether.
At the conclusion of the book, Heller writes that a logical extension of herstudy would be to expand it beyond the confines of the school context to ‘theother spaces in which (students) participate, as well as to the economic, politicaland social constraints on their circulation’ (p. 221). Providing the readerswith an update on some of the (former) students would have accomplished –albeit in a clearly limited though surely interesting fashion – exactly this. Ata more basic level, adding an update chapter to this 2nd edition of the bookwould have satisfied the inevitable curiosity this reader had about what hashappened since 1994 – to the school, to French-language immersion teachingand learning, to the students, and even to the children of some of the students,especially in terms of the transmission, or lack of transmission, of French tothe next generation. It could have also provided additional insight into the
ways in which schools and their students, both during and after their schoolyears, negotiate the shifting ‘politics of identity’ and the ways in which French,English, and bi/multilingualism inevitably play a part in this ever-changingprocess. In other words, the addition of an update chapter would have furtherstrengthened an already strong, extremely readable, and theoretically rich andinformed analysis.
CHRISTOF DEMONT-HENRICH
School of CommunicationUniversity of Denver2490 S. Gaylord St.
M. RAFAEL SALABERRY (ed.). Language Allegiances and Bilingualism in the U.S.Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters. 2009. 212 pp. Hb (978184769181)£59.95/$99.95 / Pb (9781747691774) £24.95/$39.95.
Reviewed by NYDIA FLORES-FERRAN
The connection between language and the sense of affiliation with culture andidentity – that notion of allegiance – has been discussed by many scholars. Butthe provocative and disturbing treatment of this topic by Salaberry is unique. Hehas assembled a league of well-respected scholars that evoke strong messages:enough is enough!
Zentella (2003: 54) has argued that
[e]ver since the 1970s, when demographers began to predict that Hispanics wouldbecome the largest minority group in the nation in the early part of the twenty-firstcentury, policies that restrict legal, educational, health, and employment serviceshave been implemented at local, state, and national levels. Those policies frustratedimmigrant efforts to pull out of poverty, while an elite class amassed unprecedentedwealth, based in part on the cheap labor of Latinos and other immigrants. Theresulting economic disparities constitute serious challenges to our democraticideals of equality and justice, yet they receive much less attention than the Englishproficiency of immigrants.
But the book’s treatment regarding language allegiances is not only aboutLatinos; it is about the rights of human beings who live in a free democraticsociety. This collection of essays does not necessarily call for more research. Inreading the book, one gets a sense that the topic of language allegiances hasbeen researched sufficiently from distinct perspectives and yet, policy makers,education, law, and labor, etc. remain unresponsive. Several book chaptersprovoke unsettling thoughts while they also help us develop an awareness ofexisting contradictions and deleterious practices in our education and legal
systems. In essence, the book reveals new insights about our systems’ failures toaddress the American beings we are today.
One may ask how the editor, M. Rafael Salaberry, managed to elicit such areaction with an edited volume that has very distinct topics. First, Salaberrysets the tone by introducing and embracing the scholarship related to languageidentity and affiliation in the first chapter. For instance, from a sociolinguisticperspective, he points to studies that have been conducted on second andthird-generation Latinos and the manner in which the system progressivelypushes a mainstream U.S. culture – pushing its citizenry to become culturallyhomogeneous. From a legal perspective, the book also delves into how languageis an essential property of cultural identity, and how the workplace and ourlegal system have not conformed to the fact that employees should have theright to speak the language of their identity. The book also explores the reasonswhy there is a disfavoring of bilingualism in the U.S. as a national practice:American nationalism. In essence, in its nine chapters, Salaberry tackles thetopic of language allegiances at the micro and macro level in the U.S. Amongthe issues discussed are community attitudes, linguistic profiling, languagelegal rights, ethno-linguistic hegemony, the deconstruction and constructionof mono-lingual ideologies, and bilingual education today. He has assembled thebest scholars to engage the reader on each subject: Almeida Jaqueline Toribio;Nancy Niedzielski; Dennis Preson; Sandra del Valle; Thomas Ricento; RonaldSchmidt; and Ofelia Garcıa.
Toribio, in Chapter 2, presents an empirical study on the language attitudes ofresidents of Reading, Pennsylvania – what is now known as a small industrial citybut which was, in the early 70s, a well-known transient migrant-worker stop formany Hispanics. By way of ethnography, she insightfully discusses DominicanHispanics’ perceptions regarding language loyalties. The study’s micro analysisshows how Dominicans in Reading maintain their Spanish language practicesand how ‘[t]he practices of the dominant society are not necessarily the mostvital in achieving social and economic success; maintenance of distinct culturalpractices are also implicated’ (p. 39). She cautions the reader to examine co-ethnic settlements of Hispanics in other geographic areas that have witnesseda recent and significant influx of Dominican immigrants. Although Dominicansreport a strong attachment to their heritage language, and it is a strong indicatorand expression of ethnicity, the fact that this city has had Hispanic residents overthe past 40 years may have mediated the positive effects produced in the study.Of the many contributions found in this chapter, one noticeable point reportedby Toribio is the fact that the Dominicans in Reading differentiate themselvesfrom other Hispanic groups – such as the Puerto Ricans, who maintain distinctlanguage loyalties to Spanish and English.
Chapter 3, by Niedzielski, represents a rude awakening with regard to howlearners of English are perceived by speech therapists. We learn from thischapter that the special-education field has not been the only one saturatedwith misplaced English language learners (ELLs). In this chapter, Niedzielski
discusses how Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs) have also been impactedby the presence of ELLs in their practice, and the misconceptions that havearisen regarding these learners. The author approaches this chapter with severalthemes: one is the myth that there exists one ‘general American English’, a goodkind, which all speakers should speak and that anything different represents adisorder. Another theme she discusses is the fact that linguists, in particular thosewho research variation, need to draw connections to the field of speech pathologyand vice versa. Niedzielski also points to issues related to non-standard dialectswhich have often been considered symptomatic of speech disorders. Althoughthe author claims that not all SLP practitioners feel that all non-standard dialectsneed ‘to be fixed’ (p. 69), university programs that graduate students in the SLPfield do not provide courses in the field of sociolinguistics.
Preston’s Chapter 4 on linguistic profiling presents a compelling discussionabout whether lay persons have the capacity (linguistic) to determine theidentity of a speaker with any degree of accuracy. It also discusses to whatdegree, if any, these capacities can be used as legitimate sources of informationduring testimony. While Preston reports from a poll that an unprecedentedmajority of people claim that they can determine the identity of a person bytheir voice, the application of that information is even more disturbing froma linguistic perspective. Namely, people claim that ‘testimony of voice witnessaccounts should be admissible in court’ (p. 56). Preston goes on to explainlanguage variation and dialect studies conducted by other scholars (Baugh;Labov; Niedzielski; Thomas and Reaser) and how language variation anddialectal distinctions may affect the accuracy of laypersons in determining theidentity of a speaker. Thus, he cautions readers that linguists should be carefulin characterizing to others the degree of accuracy in laypersons’ identificationof speech. In closing, Preston provides several suggestions to improve linguisticprofiling. What we learn from this chapter is that the judicial system shouldconsult sociolinguists – expert scholars trained in the field – who can serve asexpert witnesses, rather than laypersons who gather opinions based on ‘it soundsto me as if . . .’.
The workplace and language rights are discussed by Del Valle. In particular,she draws on two cases of employment discrimination where bilingual employeeswere fired for violating an English-only policy at work. In opening, however, DelValle’s chapter presents findings from a 2005 case of child abuse and neglect inwhich a judge warned an 18-year-old mother from Mexico to learn English orrisk losing her child. Del Valle’s accounts of cases such as these, and the nationalanxiety that she suggests the U.S. is facing post 9/11, present a picture of a hostilenation, a new xenophobic profile that has embraced the legal system. Del Valleargues that the U.S. legal system to date does not have a statute that protects thelanguage rights of its citizenry, especially under the civil rights law, a legal gapthat positions the U.S. as ‘abysmally “tongue-tied”’ (p. 104).
It has been often argued that the nation is at risk, and that the number ofU.S. citizens studying a foreign language is dismal when we compare it to other
nations (Simon 1988). However, Recinto’s chapter delves into the orientationof ‘language-as-a-resource’ and how this orientation temporarily masks themaintenance of heritage-language use. While the country, he notes, lacks instrategic languages such as Arabic, Farsi, etc., it bemoans the same programsthat benefit language learning in the country: bilingual and foreign-languageeducation. Ricento also claims that the ‘language-as-a-right’ orientation haslittle chance of supporting the status of minority languages which he considersis already truncated. The author calls for a re-thinking of the association betweenlanguage and its geopolitical importance. He asks that we promote languagesacross-the-board with proactive policies, not temporary remedies.
Schmidt’s chapter on English hegemony and the politics of ethno-linguisticjustice in the U.S. is an essay on how the country over its history has obliteratedimmigrant-language use and has promoted its preference to homogenize itsspeakers. While the U.S., Schmidt argues, has had no ‘official language’policy, in practice, it has had an assimilationist approach to English. Thus,it should not surprise Schmidt that there is no significant political movementin favor of linguistic pluralism. Schmidt explains that it is the nation’s corevalues – predominantly U.S. nationalism – that supports monolingualismand that these values have been compounded with the post 9/11 surgesagainst immigrants. In summary, Schmidt claims that a combination ofEnglish-language hegemony, a linguistically self-centered understanding of U.S.nationalism, and the interpretation of individuals’ understanding of freedomand equality for all, together, undermine the development of a multilingualsociety, one which gave birth to the nation in the first place.
Garcıa’s chapter ‘Livin’ and teachin’ la lengua loca’, begins with a discussionregarding the presence of Spanish in U.S. history. The chapter presents twomonoglossic constructions: one which constructs Spanish as a ‘minority’language, and the second that positions Spanish in the Spanish-speaking world –the global perspective. In discussing the monoglossic ideologies constructedin the U.S., Garcıa illustrates the disparities found in the U.S. Census datacollection with regard to the use of Spanish as opposed to English. Sheeven contends with issues of how foreign-born U.S. Latinos are consideredas monolinguals when, indeed, all data show that more than half of thispopulation is bilingual. The treatment of this topic boils down to this message:the monoglossic ideology is constructed by racializing (her italics) the Spanishin the U.S. With regard to the global perspective, the author also discusses theeconomic, political, and cultural power that comes with Spanish today basedon the economic surge in Spain which strongly supports the South Americaneconomy. Garcıa’s position is this: if it were not for the U.S. Latino market,the global standing of Spanish would not be where it is today. The metaphoricexpressions used throughout this chapter to describe both ideologies, educationalaspect of Spanish as a ‘foreign’ and heritage language, and the erasure ofthis language, are unique, relevant, and concisely situated throughout thechapter.
The last chapter presents Salaberry’s views on bilingual education:assimilation, segregation and integration. Salaberry proposes that some bilingualeducation programs, such as the dual-language programs, help to promote andembrace the connection between language and identity. In other words, hesuggests that programs that have minority and majority students learningboth languages assist children in drawing connections to differing culturalviewpoints. The chapter presents opposing and supporting positions with regardto bilingual education in the U.S. Among the arguments opposing bilingualeducation, Salaberry suggests, are the segregationalist perspective and the‘cost’ perspective – the cost of building a multicultural society. Although heacknowledges the surmountable challenges that are met by dual-languageprograms, Salaberry maintains his stance in saying that these challengesshould not detract from conducting research on the benefits of dual-languageinstruction for majority children.
As a closing commentary, I would like to add that the chapters in the bookare engaging, critical, and current, in that they present the political and socialdiscourses at the micro and macro level – something to imbue our thinking.
REFERENCES
Simon, Paul. 1988. The Tongue-Tied American. New York: Continuum.Zentella, Ana Celia. 2003. ‘Jose can you see?’: Latin@ responses to racist discourse.
In Doris Sommer (ed.) Bilingual Aesthetics. New York: Palgrave Press. 51–66.
NYDIA FLORES-FERRAN
Department of Learning and Teaching, Graduate School of Education andDepartment of Spanish & Portuguese
School of Arts and SciencesRutgers State University
CHANTAL BOUCHARD. Obsessed with Language: A Sociolinguistic History of Quebec.Translated by Luise von Flotow. Toronto, Canada: Guernica. 2008. 289 pp. Pb(9781550712933) $27.00.
Reviewed by KOENRAAD KUIPER
The French language and the francophone population in Canada are of longstanding. Both are currently islands in a sea of English and the English. From itsearly days as the dominant population in Canada and its gradual withdrawal tothe heartland of Quebec, the francophone North Americans have been concernedabout their place, and the place of their culture and language in a continent on the
other side of the Atlantic from their homeland. In this book, Bouchard provides anoverview of what the intellectual elite of the francophone community in Quebecthought about the French spoken in Canada and the position of the francophonecommunity in Canada. The account is chronological with an emphasis on theperiod since 1850; by which time the influence of British colonization of Canadahad become strongly felt and when social changes to the previously establishedsettlement patterns of the Canadiens began to change.
In Chapter 1, Bouchard deals with the matter of communal identity, its relationto culture, and contribution of language, religion and race (as it was conceivedof in earlier periods). Bouchard has a Whorfian view of language:
The syntax and morphology of any given language also condition thought,providing a human being, from birth, with a way to organize concepts that providemeaning, modes of expression outside of which communication is impossible, orchaotic and unpredictable. (p. 34)
It is clear that Bouchard believes in communal identity and regards it assignificant to the welfare of the community and its members. She believes thatcommunities can have identity crises.
In Chapter 2, Bouchard gives a bird’s-eye view of French in Quebec, looking atthe dialects of French which the early colonists brought with them and developedin Canada. She supposes that by the mid-eighteenth century the French spokenin Canada would not have been greatly different from that spoken by the lowerclasses in the French-speaking parts of France. As to the population itself,Chapter 3 describes the seigneury system of settlement along the bank of theSt Lawrence River, with its strip development and absence of villages. Withthe arrival of English colonial power, the church largely took over from thefeudal overlords as the voice of authority and maintained a strong conservativepresence in rural Quebec while the English took over business in the towns.Being a Canadien was to be Catholic, French speaking and North American,while to be Anglais was seen to be a British citizen happening to live in NorthAmerica. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century most of the Canadienswere monolingually French, interference from English gradually making itselfevident in the French spoken in contact situations, chiefly in the towns.
Chapter 4 begins in 1876 when a federal structure was imposed on Canadacreating a realization in the French Canadians that they were a minority inCanada. Their people did not participate in the drive westward leading tosignificant urbanization of the young people who could not find land to carry onthe rural life of their ancestors. Being poorly educated, these French speakerswere at the bottom of the social ladder in the cities. As the steel industrydeveloped in the U.S.A. in the early years of the twentieth century, poorly-educated francophones were employed there under the direction of anglophonebosses. Bouchard associates this loss of social status with a decline in the respectwith which the Canadiens felt for their own culture, this manifesting itself in
attempts by the elites to talk up Canadien culture, ascribing virtue to les habitants,the original subsistence farmers who were praised for retained the old virtues,Catholicism and the French language.
However the influence of English and its higher status were undeniable.Signage was in English, business French was larded with English borrowings sothat gradually increasing anxiety about the state and status of French manifesteditself in the writings of the francophone elite. As might be expected, this lead toa desire to rid French of Anglicisms in the kind of purist movement that is nowfamiliar from similar situations elsewhere. Chapter 5 illustrates this alongsideexhortations to modernise the vernacular French spoken in the countryside.Alongside these internal moves, the anglophone population fostered a folk myththat the Canadiens spoke only a patois rather than French itself. While there werecertainly some archaisms in the French spoken in Canada, Bouchard showsthat patois was not spoken in Quebec. Bilingualism, as might be predicted, wasincreasing and with it, anxiety concerning the future of French.
In Chapter 6, Bouchard shows how in the period from 1910 to 1940 duringwhich urban drift continued and a middle class of francophones gradually grewin the cities, the ideological discourse concentrated on the subsistence farmer asthe repository of French Canadian culture, language and religion; thus, giving upeconomic advancement in favour of spiritual virtue. Over against the languageand culture of the peasants was the evil of English with its capacity to invade andcorrupt. Thus, the battle was to assert that the peasants on the one hand spokegenuine French and not a patois, and at the same time the influences of Englishwere to be combated. The chapter finishes with an analysis of the rhetoricaltropes used by the elites to image out the situation with metaphors such as thoseof war, biology and spiritual exhortation.
Chapter 7 covers the years 1940–1960. Post World War II it was no longerpossible to hold the peasant farmer up as an example of the true French Canadiansince fewer than 20 percent of French Canadians still worked the land. Instead,the majority of French Canadians were members of the poorly-educated workingclass in the cities and towns. They were also dominated in this situation by theEnglish middle classes. This is reflected in how the elite wrote about the Frenchlanguage in Quebec, seeing it as of the same status as the majority of its speakers.
Chapter 8 provides a survey of the views of language columnists from 1917to 1970 showing how their views fluctuated with the fluctuating social fortunesof francophones in Canada.
Chapter 9 deals with the decade from 1960 to 1970 and the ‘quiet revolution’.Here the history is within living memory. It includes the Royal Commissionon Bilingualism and Biculturalism and the Trudeau government’s OfficialLanguages Act. Bouchard sees the events of this decade as being an about-turn onthe negative views that Quebecois had of themselves and of them taking chargeof their future, leading to various attempts to enshrine French as the language ofQuebec and to support it with state institutions, through, for example, changesin signage and schooling requirements.
What has happened since 1970 has been documented in other publications,for example Larrive (2003) and Oaks and Warren (2007), but it is clear fromBouchard’s account that the decade 1960–1970 is where the seeds for the futuredirection of language and social policy in Quebec were sown.
So what might be said at the conclusion of such an interesting and fraughthistory? The data for Bouchard’s survey comes from two sources: the author’sown collection of newspaper columns and letters to the editor; and a collection oftexts related to language collected by Bouthiller and Meyernaud (1972). Givenits sources, the work is thus a study of the expressed attitudes of intellectuals,some of whom are knowledgeable about linguistic matters while others are not.This is evident from many of the quotations in the volume where the kind ofstatements are made about the French spoken in Canada that are also evident inmany similar publications elsewhere. At the conclusion of the book, Bouchardsays:
The analysis of this meta-discourse in a dominated linguistic community thus makesit possible to grasp the relations this community has with others around it. It wouldbe interesting to compare what New Zealanders or Argentinians have to say, sincethey share the fate of the Quebecois in speaking a language whose norms are definedelsewhere. (p. 264)
If we look at this parallel in the case of New Zealand, we see that the restrictedrange of sources which Bouchard fully acknowledges in her first chapter havea role to play in providing a, perhaps, less-than-balanced view of linguisticmatters and socio-political inferences to be drawn from such writing. In NewZealand too, the local variety of English was heavily criticised during the sameperiod as it was in Quebec and by the same kinds of people: leader writers; somevisitors; university professors of English; school inspectors. Some New Zealandwriters took the same inferences from the ‘decline’ of the English language inNew Zealand: that New Zealanders were not maintaining standards; that youngpeople were ruining the language; that New Zealand culture was inferior to thatof Britain. While this was subject to debate amongst a small set of upper-middle-class older people, the New Zealand population carried on speaking New ZealandEnglish and creating, willy nilly, a new regional dialect of English. There is noevidence that young people regarded themselves as uttering a stream of ‘impurevocalisations’ nor did most New Zealanders feel themselves inferior to people inEngland (Gordon 1983).
This parallel calls into question the social history of attitudes Boucharddocuments as being representative of community attitudes. It particularly callsinto question one of the guiding assumptions of the book: namely that there is asingle group identity of all francophones in Quebec, or all New Zealanders, andthat this is articulated by members of the literate upper-middle class who haveaccess to the media and who become the leaders of public debate and concern.The ideology of group identity which Bouchard supports, has a socio-politicalmotivation which is clear from the socio-political history of Quebec over the last
fifty years. Just as Maori spokespeople in New Zealand speak of ‘our people’ andpurport to represent them, so Quebec intellectuals purported to speak for theirpeople and perhaps they did and do. But that cannot be taken as read. Nor canwe suppose that because intellectuals believe there is a social identity crisis thateveryone in the community feels this. The situation of francophones in NorthAmerica over the past 200 years has been one of relatively low socio-politicalinfluence until recently. The way in which the government of Quebec has createdthe modern province of Quebec as a francophone bastion, is synchronised withsimilar movements elsewhere. To be sure, ideology plays a part in social changebut so do many other factors. What Bouchard shows is how language and talkabout language can be emblematic for calls for social action. It is for this reasonthat it is efficacious to have Whorfian beliefs about language, since then one canjustify the use of language preservation as a call for culture preservation.
REFERENCES
Bouthiller, Guy and Jean Meynaud. 1972. Le choc des languages au Quebec, 1760 –1970. Montreal, Canada: Presses de l’Universit5e du Quebec.
Gordon, Elizabeth M. 1983. ‘The flood of impure vocalisation’: A study of attitudestowards New Zealand speech. The NZ Speech-Language Therapists Journal 38: 16–39.
Larrive, Pierre (ed.). 2003. Linguistic Conflict and Language Laws: Understanding theQuebec Question. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.
Oakes, Leigh and Jane Warren. 2007. Language, Citizenship and Identity in Quebec.Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.
RAYMOND HICKEY. Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms (Studies in EnglishLanguage). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. 2007. 504 pp. Hb(9780521852999) £60.00.
Reviewed by PIOTR STALMASZCZYK
The English language in Ireland is the oldest of the overseas varieties ofEnglish, however, as succinctly observed by Jeffrey Kallen (1999: 70), it‘has received more scholarly attention in the last 15 years than it has inthe previous 150’. Fortunately for dialect and language-contact studies ingeneral, and Irish English in particular, the recent 10 years have seen severalimportant publications devoted to this variety, among them a dictionary of
‘Hiberno-English’ (Dolan 2004), a grammar of Irish English (Filppula 1999), acomprehensive bibliographical guide (Hickey 2002), and a volume of studies onthe pragmatics of Irish English (Baron and Schneider 2005). The book underreview is one of the most recent additions to this (incomplete) list by RaymondHickey, Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at Essen University,author of several studies devoted to Irish English, language contact and languagechange, corpus linguistics and phonetics, including a sound atlas of IrishEnglish.
The principal aim of the book is ‘to give an overview of English in Ireland atthe beginning of the twenty-first century’ (p. 1). This aim is realized especially inChapter 5, ‘Present-day Irish English’, the synchronic part of the book, however,it is preceded by detailed historical and comparative analyses.
The introductory chapter concentrates especially on questions of terminologyand issues connected with the identity of Irish English. The variety of English usedin Ireland has been termed ‘Anglo-Irish’, ‘Hiberno-English’, ‘Hibernian English’,‘Irish English’, or, more descriptively, ‘the Irish dialect of English’, ‘the Irishvariety of English’, and ‘the English of Ireland’. These terms are by no meanssynonymous, definitions provided by authors may differ quite substantially,and the choice of the term may carry powerful socio-political undertones.Additionally, though in most cases the language described is considered asa variety of English with Irish influences, in some cases this viewpoint isreversed. For example, Henry (1977) considers Anglo-Irish to be a variety ofIrish. Hickey advocates the use of ‘the simpler, more neutral label Irish English’(p. 5) (henceforth Ir.E.), also because it is parallel to labels such as CanadianEnglish or Australian English, and, apparently, the term raises no substantialobjections.
Other issues discussed in the first chapter include scales of standardness forIr.E. (discussed in detail in later chapters) and speculations on possible futuredevelopments, where Hickey envisages the potential influence upon Ir.E. of recentmigrant languages, for instance Polish.
Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to external historical developments. Chapter 2investigates the arrival of the English in Ireland and considers externaldevelopments, such as the spread of English and the political situation in Irelandfrom late-medieval times to the nineteenth century. It also discusses the statusand position of English and Anglo-Norman, and the scant literary sources forearly Ir.E. One section is devoted to a detailed phonological analysis of the KildarePoems (generally assumed to be composed in the first quarter of the fourteenthcentury), in which Hickey shows the possibility of Irish influence upon medievalIr.E., though at the same time he observes that ‘caution is required [ . . . ] asnearly all unexpected features have at least one possible explanation’ (p. 56).The chapter concludes with a discussion of the peculiarities of the dialect of Forthand Bargy.
Chapter 3 concentrates on the settlement of Ulster. The reason for devoting aseparate chapter to Ulster ‘lies in the settlement history of this province which
led to the introduction of Scots and forms of Northern English which were,and still are, distinct from all varieties of English in the south of the country’(p. 85). This chapter very clearly demonstrates how historical political decisionsmay influence future linguistic developments. After introductory historicalinformation (on Ulster’s plantations; ethnic and religious distribution), followingGeorge Brendan Adams, a pioneer of studies on the languages of Ulster, Hickeyintroduces four types of ‘English in Ulster’: Ulster Scots; Mid Ulster English; SouthUlster English; and Contact Ulster English. Hickey observes that the linguisticstatus of Ulster Scots is a matter of political rather than linguistic debate, althoughfor the purposes of this study, he uses the term ‘language’ rather than ‘variety’ asUlster Scots ‘is much further removed from standard English than other varietiesof English throughout Britain and Ireland’ (p. 101). The sections on Ulster Scotsinclude a presentation of its phonology (also in comparison with Older Scots),grammar and vocabulary. Hickey comments on the Ulster Scots revival andremarks that its ultimate fate ‘depends on social acceptance and whether it willbe used to construct future identities’ (p. 103). The sections on Ulster English alsopresent phonology and grammar, and they conclude with a list of grammaticalfeatures shared by the varieties of Ir.E., ‘north and south’ (p. 120).
Chapter 4 focuses on the emergence of Irish English. It opens with remarks onlanguage shift in Ireland, complete by the late-nineteenth century:
The most remarkable fact in the linguistic history of Ireland since the seventeenthcentury is the abandonment of the Irish language by successive generations, to suchan extent that the remaining Irish-speaking areas today are only a fraction of thesize of the country and contain not much more than one percent of the population.(p. 121)
After discussing types and effects of language contact in general and possiblesources of idiosyncratic features in Ir.E. (e.g. transfer from Irish, dialect formsof English, archaic forms of English), Hickey provides a concise overview ofstructural features of Irish, concentrating on verbal, nominal, pronominaland propositional ‘areas’, and also selected sentential structures, such asrelativisation, subordination, topicalisation, negation, and responsives. Againstthis background, he offers a detailed presentation of the morphology and syntaxof Ir.E. Data sources for the grammatical analysis include A Survey of IrishEnglish Usage, A Corpus of Irish English but also Irish emigrants’ letters and theOld Bailey texts. After presenting these sources and important methodologicalconsiderations on data collections, corpora and statistics, Hickey gives a lengthytreatment of Ir.E. grammar, where the discussion of appropriate constructionsis accompanied by numerous examples and information on acceptance (takenfrom the Survey of Irish English Usage) of the analysed structures, the latterfeature being unique in the treatments of Ir. E. grammar. As an epilogue to thetopic of language shift, the author includes a section on the influence of Englishupon Irish, where examples of changes in syntax and idiomatic patterns ‘show
how permeable the syntax of Irish is, despite the obvious typological differencesbetween it and English’ (p. 295).
Chapter 5 deals predominantly with present-day Ir.E., its pronunciation,background, subvarieties and distribution across the country. The presentationof the sound system is very detailed, with comments on historical developments,phonological processes and interesting comparisons across different varieties,e.g. ‘new Dublin English’ (Hickey 2005) and ‘Estuary English’. Whereas EstuaryEnglish is ‘a middle way between Cockney and Received Pronunciation’, newDublin English may be viewed as ‘a new variety based on the dissociation fromlocal Dublin English’ (p. 360).
Hickey devotes considerable attention to: the representation of Ir.E. inliterature; sociolinguistic issues connected with the development of urban Ir.E.(Dublin, Belfast, Derry and Coleraine); the pragmatics of Ir.E.; and also presents arelatively-brief section on the lexicon – which could have been usefully expandedto include information on the regional distribution of lexical items and their socialacceptance across Ireland.
In Chapter 5, Hickey reports on a study of the acquisition of specific features ofIr.E. by speakers of diverse languages (Yoruba, Polish, Latvian and Russian) andstates that ‘second-language varieties of Irish English can offer insights both intothe manner in which second-language acquisition proceeds, depending on thefirst-language background, and into the order in which non-standard featuresof Irish English are picked up by foreigners’ (p. 379).
Chapter 6 contains a brief discussion of ‘transportation overseas’, i.e. thelinguistic effects of emigration from Ireland to Britain, the United States (withinteresting insights on possible parallels with the development of AfricanAmerican English), Canada, the Caribbean (with special focus on Barbados),Australia and New Zealand.
Six appendices include:
• a brief outline of Irish history;• a list of important dates and events for Ir.E. studies from the creation of
the Kildare Poems in the fourteenth century to the publication of the fourthvolume of Celtic Englishes in 2006;
• Hickey’s own translations of three extracts from the Kildare Poems;• an example of the Forth and Bargy dialect;• a useful glossary of 43 terms (from ‘ascendancy’ to ‘Yola’); and• eight detailed maps corresponding to the varieties and regions discussed
throughout the book.
Raymond Hickey’s Irish English is a work of impressive scholarship, verywell documented and thoroughly researched. Together with the same author’sinvaluable Source Book for Irish English (Hickey 2002), corpus of Irish English(Hickey 2003), Sound Atlas of Irish English (Hickey 2004), and aforementionedstudy of Dublin English (Hickey 2005), this book constitutes a definitive account
of the historical development and present-day situation of Ir.E., and signpostsdirections for possible future research into language change and languagecontact in Ireland.
REFERENCES
Barron, Anne and Klaus Schneider (eds.). 2005. The Pragmatics of Irish English. Berlin,Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dolan, Terence P. 2004 [1998]. A Dictionary of Hiberno-English: The Irish Use ofEnglish. 2nd edition. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan.
Filppula, Markku. 1999. The Grammar of Irish English. Language in Hibernian Style.London: Routledge.
Henry, Patrick Leo. 1977. Anglo-Irish and its Irish background. In Diarmaid OMuirithe (ed.) The English Language in Ireland. Dublin and Cork, Ireland: MercierPress. 20–36.
Hickey, Raymond. 2002. A Source Book for Irish English. Amsterdam, TheNetherlands/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: John Benjamins.
Hickey, Raymond. 2003. Corpus Presenter: Processing Software for Language Analysis:Including a Corpus of Irish English. Amsterdam, The Netherlands/Philadelphia,Pennsylvania: John Benjamins.
Hickey, Raymond. 2004. A Sound Atlas of Irish English. Berlin, Germany: Mouton deGruyter.
Hickey, Raymond. 2005. Dublin English: Evolution and Change. Amsterdam, TheNetherlands/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: John Benjamins.
Kallen, Jeffrey. 1999. Irish English and the Ulster Scots controversy. Ulster Folklife 45:70–85.
PIOTR STALMASZCZYK
Department of English and General Linguistics,University of Łodz,
MARCIA FARR. Rancheros in Chicagoacan: Language and Identity in a TransnationalCommunity. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. 2006. 312 pp. Pb(029271483) $22.95.
Reviewed by TIM KLINGLER
In this substantive work, Marcia Farr synthesizes the findings of fifteen yearsof ethnographic research of a social network of Mexican ranchero familiesliving in Chicago and Michoacan – a transnational spatial context she termsChicagoacan. The text offers a detailed ethnographic portrait of a group frequentlymisrepresented in popular culture and academic studies, an important task giventhat rancheros comprise an estimated one-fifth of the Mexican population and
perhaps the majority of Mexican immigrants in the United States. Documentingthe history of rancheros in Mexico and their migration to Chicago, the text focusesits analysis on language practices and three primary ways of speaking:
Farr examines how these salient styles, as well as racial discourse, both indexand construct local ranchero identities and ideologies.
In the introduction, Farr outlines her research methodology and rationaleand describes her data: a decade of participant-observation fieldwork, historicalrecords, audio-taped sociolinguistic interviews, and recordings of 130 ninety-minute recordings of naturally occurring conversation. She highlights worksthat examine the relationship between discourse, language styles, languageideologies, and identity before introducing the three speech styles in terms of orderand disorder. While franqueza and respeto reaffirm the social order (characterizedby both egalitarian and hierarchical relations), relajo creates space for disorderthat can challenge social relations. She observes that constant movement ofrancheros between Mexico and Chicago reinforces ranchero linguistic practicesand identity.
In the second chapter, Farr explores the etymology, popular representations,and multiple meanings of the terms rancho and ranchero. In an extensive reviewof ranchero history in western Mexico, she emphasizes historical conditions thatled to the formation of an identity that values independence, individualism,directness, and egalitarianism. She describes rancheros as historically inhabitinga middle ground between urban, professional elites, and groups in which theytraditionally have been categorized: rural, poor, indigenous groups and landlesspeasants. In contrast to the communal and non-capitalistic values of the latter,the members of the social network in the study reflect historic ranchero values:an emphasis on private property rights, entrepreneurialism, and autonomy.Combined with a habituation to mobility, these characteristics seem to disposerancheros to accepting the sacrifices and risks inherent in migration in the hopesof economic gain.
In the following two chapters, Farr goes on to describe the binationalcommunity created by the constant movement of goods and people betweenSan Juanico, the Michoacan rancho of origin of the study’s members, and theMexican neighborhoods of Chicago. She presents a comprehensive descriptionof the geography, demographics and history of San Juanico, an account ofMexican migration to Chicago from 1916 to the present, and a description ofChicago neighborhoods where San Juanico rancheros reside, underlining eventsand practices that index a ranchero identity of independence, individuality, andentrepreneurialism. She describes the members of the social network studiedand the multiple relationships between them and examines the domains of work,education, religion, and language. Several intriguing observations include the
1. The individualistic ethos of rancheros supports women working outside thehome in Chicago, creating a space to challenge patriarchal structures andfoster changes in gender relations.
2. Ranchero men take fewer advantages of educational opportunities thanwomen because they associate masculinity with productive work andphysical labor.
3. Religion plays in important role in ranchero life, and respect for religiousauthority contrasts with rejection of civil authority. Women assertconsiderable authority in the religious domain, and the rancheros in her studypractice a Catholicism that ignores celebrations associated with indigenoustraditions, such as the Day of the Dead.
4. Rancheros are aware of the aesthetic potential of language and prominentlyemploy oral genres, yet many of the unique phonological, lexical, andmorphological features of ranchero speech are stigmatized as ‘uneducated’in elite Mexican society and as incorrect prescriptively within formaleducational settings.
In the fifth chapter, Farr explores ranchero racial discourse and how it defieshomogenizing notions of imagined communities in each country. In Mexico, therancheros of San Juanico construct a non-indigenous identity that emphasizestheir Spanish heritage, material progress, and individualism and contrastswith national racial categories that ‘Indianize’ (p. 27) rural mestizos. In theUnited States, rancheros defy classification in the dominant white/non-whiteracial categories; never identifying themselves as ‘Hispanic’ and rarely using‘Latino’, they self-identify as Mexican. For Farr, language serves to index andreinforce ranchero racial identity, as well as to resist externally imposed categories.Rancheros employ franqueza (‘frankness’), for example, to distinguish themselvesfrom indigenous neighbors. In an analysis of a recorded discussion of race amongadult women, Farr demonstrates how the ludic treatment of differing nationalideologies in relajo exposes their constructed nature and highlights limitationsof hegemonic categories.
In the next chapter, Farr explores franqueza, the predominant style andmost salient feature of ranchero speech. Ranchero identity is rooted in a liberal,entrepreneurial individualist ideology that values notions of upward mobility andprogress through individual hard work while rejecting government interventionand communal, non-capitalistic orientations. Emerging from this particularhabitus, rancheros construct a self-assertive, autonomous identity throughfranqueza, direct, candid, honest talk that contrasts with that of deferentialpeones and the indirect verbal politeness of the urban, educated elite describedas cortesıa (courtesy). Frequently employing bald-on-record devices, such asdirect questions and directives, and eschewing threat mitigating speech acts,rancheros simultaneously utilize franqueza to negotiate individual autonomy and
foster affiliation through establishing confianza (trust). While the speech styleindexes an egalitarian ideology among those of similar age and gender, it alsocan index a relationship of unequal status. To highlight the use of franqueza,Farr analyzes two narrative performances. In the first, an elderly man performsranchero masculinity by utilizing a self-assertive style which constructs him asindependent, powerful, and in control in the face of civil authority. In the second,a woman’s candid, frank language in story-telling projects a strong, independentstance that challenges and creates space to transform traditional gender norms.
In Chapter 7, Farr explores respeto, a way of speaking that indexes andaffirms the hierarchical social order within ranchero families through verbalformulas, prohibition of taboo language, and use of the formal and informalsecond-person forms of address, tu and usted. While observing that pronoun useis a primary means to construct hierarchy, Farr also identifies gender as themost influential aspect of pronoun choice, with both men and women avoidinguse of tu across genders. Interestingly, the hierarchy affirmed by respeto, inwhich young people defer to older ones and women defer to men, coexists withan egalitarian ethos based on reciprocity – group commitment and individualautonomy – that structures relations between families and those of the same ageand gender. As a result, respeto employed by rancheros avoids the indirectness andpoliteness strategies of elite Mexican society. Farr describes how ranchera womennavigate competing language ideologies within the patriarchal system: their useof franqueza to construct themselves as assertive and independent conflicts withthe use of respeto to express deference to men and avoid taboo language.
In Chapter 8, a revised version of a book chapter published in 1998, Farrexplores relajo, joking speech that is framed as play and that frequently commentson discourse itself. In addition to describing the aesthetic elements of relajo andthe rhetorical devices it employs, she emphasizes its political nature and potentialto challenge the social order. Farr describes relajo as a verbal microfiesta – a localcarnival, in Bahktinian terms – that allows rancheros to explore traditionalvalues in a new cultural context, as well as challenge practices and conventionsin the social network. Farr includes two detailed analysis of multilayered relajonarratives that reference events in the Mexican rancho, one involving men andone involving women. In the first example, the storytelling reaffirms notions ofmasculinity that are grounded in traditional gender and age-based hierarchy. Incontrast, the relajo among women – which is more dialogical and collaborative –challenges traditional gender norms through the linguistic performance thatparodies feminine ideals and appropriates practices that traditionally indexmasculinity. While recognizing that relajo is sanctioned disorder, Farr suggeststhat the challenges to order during relajo leak into other domains and facilitatethe transformation of identities in the social network. While relajo plays withidentity and fosters individual autonomy, it does so in the context of groupsolidarity and confianza.
Farr concludes by summarizing key themes that she deems important forteachers and community workers who interact with ranchero families and their
children. For example, all three ways of speaking index an identity rooted inboth individualism and familism, in contrast to outside ideologies that labelrancheros as communal and Indian. In addition, the discourse analyzed indicatesthat gender relations are an arena of tension and change in this transnationalcommunity. Farr also reflects on the importance of microlevel discourse analysisfor ethnographic studies, the value of field-based ethnographic research, and thetransformative potential and reflexivity of ethnography.
Farr’s detailed ethnolinguistic portrait of transnational rancheros is a valuableresource for a variety of readers. As the author herself suggests, the text canbenefit educators and community workers in Mexico and the United States whointeract with ranchero-origin students and families. By challenging stereotypesand addressing ignorance of this important subgroup of Mexicans, the text canhelp foster respect for and awareness of ranchero resources for those who seek toprovide pedagogies and services that build on their communicative competenciesand oral skills.
The text is also a significant resource for a variety of academic disciplines andthose examining rancheros, immigrant groups in the United States, Chicano/as,or transnational communities from a sociological, anthropological, or historicalperspective. Although most of the references were published prior to 1999, theextensive bibliography includes a wealth of information. While repetitive attimes, the text is well written, organized, and accessible to undergraduate as wellas graduate students. For those in the field of linguistics, the work underlinesthe interpretive strength of integrating discourse analysis and ethnography,demonstrated especially in the exploration of relajo. The text is particularlypertinent to those interested in the relationship between language and identity,especially in terms of gender and ethnicity. Farr’s study highlights the creativepower of linguistic practices in constructing identity, as well as the influence ofmaterial historical conditions.
TIM KLINGLER
Department of Spanish and PortuguesePhelps Hall 4206
University of California, Santa BarbaraSanta Barbara, CA 93106
PAUL V. KROSKRITY AND MARGARET C. FIELD (eds.). Native American LanguageIdeologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country. Tuscon, Arizona:The University of Arizona Press. 2009. 353 pp. Hb (9780816527199) $49.95.
Reviewed by BRAD MONTGOMERY-ANDERSON
This book is a collection of thirteen articles dealing with changing languageattitudes among Native American communities, particularly among groupsthat are undertaking language revitalization programs. The study of language
ideologies has emerged as a distinct field of inquiry since Michael Silverstein’s1979 article ‘Language structure and linguistic ideology.’ The developmentof this field has taken place alongside the tremendous growth of languagerevitalization efforts; one could argue, in fact, that the emergence of the latter hasgiven a markedly practical application to the study of language ideologies. In hisseminal work Reversing Language Shift Joshua Fishman (1991: 394) noted that‘ideological clarification’ is a necessary precursor to any language revitalizationinitiative, a concept that he did not develop further. The current volume helpsto fill this conceptual gap and is the first work to address language ideologiesamong Native American communities.
In the first chapter the editors give an overview of the study of languageideology itself as well as useful summaries of the following twelve articles. Botheditors have a thorough grounding in this field and they have assembled animpressive collection of articles dealing with a wide spectrum of issues. Thisreview will briefly discuss six of these articles; I have chosen these articlesfor diversity of topic in order to be representative of the collection as awhole.
Part 1 of this collection, ‘Language and language ideological change’, startswith a chapter ‘Changing Navajo language ideologies and language use’ byMargaret Field in which she challenges the view that Navajo language ideologiesare homogenous and conservative. The central point of this article is to highlightthe changing and heterogeneous attitudes of this community toward their ownlanguage and its relation to the English. Field refers to Irvine and Gal’s (2002)notion of iconicity to represent ‘the tendency on the parts of both outsidersand insiders to essentialize or reduce the nature of “Navajo-ness” to somethinghomogenous and simplistic’ (p. 41). She concludes this study with a look at howfactors such as age and religion affect these attitudes and how these attitudes inturn have an impact on language revitalization initiatives.
In ‘English is the dead language: Native perspective on bilingualism’, JuleGomez de Garcıa, Melissa Axelrod, and Jordan Lachler discuss language attitudesamong four New Mexico communities. They examine possible explanations for‘the perceived coldness of English’ (p. 105), an attitude that is commonly foundamong these groups. Because speakers learned English with an instrumentalmotivation – that is, to gain access to financial and political power – theNative language becomes perceived as more ‘spiritual’ with English as a ‘soullessmedium of economic transaction’ (p. 107). They refer to a ‘valorization rhetoric’that frequently employs a metaphorical concept of ‘wealth’ in order to give valueto endangered languages. The authors conclude with the intriguing observationthat such attitudes can be an important part of a successful revitalizationprogram: ‘. . . the attitude that the heritage language is inherently superior in itsdescriptive power and inextricably linked with cultural and spiritual traditions isof great value for communities in building a sense of identity around language’(p. 118). The idea that ideological manipulation is a part of the revitalizationprocess is an important one that will be taken up by Loether.
Margaret Bender describes two cases of Cherokee language attitudes in‘Visibility, authenticity, and insiderness in Cherokee language ideologies’. Thefirst case took place in northeastern Oklahoma in the 1960s and began witha Carnegie-funded project to further English literacy. An unexpected resultwas that it began to crystallize demand for linguistic sovereignty, leading toincreased signage in Cherokee, hiring of interpreters, and the eventual formationof a community organization that conducted meetings entirely in Cherokee.The more exclusionary practices of this group became controversial in thecommunity as its members implied Cherokee language ability as an indicatorof authentic Cherokeeness. Bender also explores the theme of language as asymbolic boundary in the second case. Among the Cherokee of North Carolinathe Cherokee syllabary has been increasingly used as a symbol of cultural identityand insiderness as tourism and non-Indian culture have become more prevalent.Bender’s assertion of a link between gaming and language is especially insightful;she notes that casino revenues have been directly linked to funding of languageprograms and that this revenue has ‘helped to strengthen the resources necessaryfor the preservation of cultural autonomy and the protection of the communityfrom the casino’s socio-economic and symbolic incursions’ (p. 143). She suggeststhat this heightened profile of written Cherokee as well as a renewed emphasison Cherokee language classes represent not only a push for increased languageuse; perhaps more importantly, they are part of an effort to establish communityidentity and even boundaries at a time of rapid social change.
Part 1 also includes two other chapters, Jeffrey Anderson’s ‘Contradictionsacross space-time and language ideologies in Northern Arapaho language shift’and Justin Richland’s ‘The (meta)pragmatics of tradition in a Hopi tribal courthearing’.
Part 2, ‘Language revitalization as a site for (re)new(ing) language ideologies,’more specifically addresses the interaction of language maintenance withlanguage attitudes. This section includes Barbara Meek’s ‘Language ideology andaboriginal language revitalization in the Yukon, Canada’ and Paul Kroskrity’s‘Embodying the reversal of language shift: Agency, incorporation, and languageideological change in the Western Mono community of central California’.In ‘“You keep not listening with your ears!” Language ideologies, languagesocialization, and Paiute identity’, Pamela Bunte describes how revitalizationefforts contribute to a strengthening of the link between language and identity.Bunte describes an intriguing link between language socialization and languagerevitalization when she notes that adults teach children the proper way tobehave through giving advice rather than through giving orders. This patternof non-coercive instruction extends to language behavior; because children areonly advised to speak Paiute, the language socialization process emphasizesreceptive competence rather than productive competence in the language. Thisarticle is especially insightful given the author’s 27-year relationship with thecommunity; Bunte has the perspective necessary to note a shift in the 1990swhere Paiute language ability is revalorized as symbolic of Paiute identity rather
than merely indexing it. She points out that the traditional forms of Paiutesocialization-based on passive competence and respect for individual autonomycreate a challenge for language initiatives that value the new generation’sproductive competence in the language.
Part 3, ‘Linguistic description, language activism, and reflexive concerns’,includes ‘Contingencies of emergence: Planning Maliseet language ideologies’by Bernard C. Perley and ‘Which way is the Kiowa way? Orthography choices,ideologies, and language renewal’ by Amber A. Neely and Gus Palmer, Jr. In‘Shaming the shift generation: Intersecting ideologies of family and linguisticrevitalization in Guatemala’, Jennifer Reynolds portrays community attitudestowards Mayan languages. Unlike the Paiute described by Bunte, dialects haveserved as an important source of identity for the Maya in Guatemala. Reynoldsdiscusses how the Pan-Mayan movement has sought to replace local languageidentities and attitudes with a new ideology that emphasizes a unified Mayanidentity. Reynolds uses her observations of this movement as a framework for amore general discussion of the impact that the ideologies of outsiders (i.e. linguistsand anthropologists) have on the language communities. She gives a brief butvaluable critique of Joshua Fishman’s important Reversing Language Shift (RLS)model (1991) and suggests that it may be inappropriate in certain socio-culturalframeworks. In the Mayan case, for example, the use of this model may lead toan approach of ‘shaming the shift’ in which the younger generation bears theburden of blame for language loss. Reynolds’ discussion of language ideologiesand her critique of the appropriateness of the RLS model are especially relevantto the situation in Guatemala. Nora England has recently pointed out that‘the linguistic contributions of Mayas in Guatemala are unparalleled anywhereelse’ (England 2007: 93) and that it is atypical for members of endangeredlanguage communities to have such an active role in the revitalization of thoselanguages. Reynolds’ chief concern with the RLS model is that it treats theyounger generation as a tabula rasa ‘in need of cultural reprogramming’ (p. 234)and that RLS will be successful only if the youth take charge of their own languagesocialization.
Christopher Loether explores similar themes in ‘Language revitalization andthe manipulation of language ideologies: A Shoshoni case study’. This articlewill perhaps be the most controversial of the collection as the author statesthat not just ideological clarification but ‘ideological manipulation’ (p. 239) is anecessary component of successful language shift reversal. He considers fostering‘a sense of symbolic capital’ (p. 253) in the language to be a key component ofreversing language shift and concludes this important discussion with a reminderreminiscent of Reynolds’ article: the need for the younger generation to feel asense of ownership of the language, a sense that is best encouraged throughinvesting it with both economic and symbolic capital.
This work is an important addition to the literature on language ideologyas well as language revitalization. The title of the book is perhaps too broad; ifthe collection is on the general subject of Native American ideologies it should
include articles that deal with language ideologies apart from those found inlanguage shift scenarios. The articles are not geographically representative,a fact that the editors point out in the introduction. However, these minorlimitations do not affect the book’s overall importance. Native American LanguageIdeologies is a unique contribution and will be of immense interest to linguistsand anthropologists as well as language activists.
REFERENCES
England, Nora. 2007. The influence of Mayan-speaking linguists on the state of Mayanlinguistics. In Peter K. Austin and Andrew Simpson (eds.) Endangered Languages.Hamburg, Germany: Helmut Buske Verlag. 93–112.
Fishman, Joshua. 1991. Reversing Language Shift: Theory and Practice of Assistance toThreatened Languages. Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters.
Irvine, Judith and Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation.In Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.) Regimes of Language. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School ofAmerican Research Press. 35–83.
Silverstein, Michael. 1979. Language structure and linguistic ideology. In Paul R.Clyne, William F. Hanks and Carol F. Hofbauer (eds.) The Elements: A Parasession onLinguistic Units and Levels. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Linguistic Society. 193–247.
ANNA-BRITA STENSTROM AND ANNETTE MYRE JØRGENSEN (eds.). Youngspeakin a Multilingual Perspective. Amsterdam, The Netherlands/Philadelphia,Pennsylvania: John Benjamins. 2009. 206 pp. Hb (9789027254290) €90.00/$135.00 / e-Book (978 90 272 9047 2) €90.00/$135.00.
Reviewed by JANET M. FULLER
This volume presents research on youth speech in a variety of languages set indiverse social settings. It raises important questions about what the features ofyoungspeak are, if these features are universal, and why they develop. Several ofthe chapters present clear analyses which shed light on some of the ways youngspeakers construct their social identities through linguistic means, but overallthis volume is more of a beginning than an end in terms of addressing youthlanguage.
The book begins with an introduction by the editors which explains the termsappearing in the title; ‘youngspeak’ has been selected to avoid a narrow focuson adolescents and include speakers 10–22 years old, and ‘multilingual’ refersto the fact that many different languages are represented in the volume. This
introduction brings focus to one of the main issues of the volume, the differencesbetween youngspeak and adult language. The authors in this collection agreethe distinction is more quantitative than qualitative; that is, while adults andyoung speakers may use the same features, the frequency with which they areused in youngspeak, and the innovations which occur in this context of highfrequency usage, distinguishes youth from adult language use. This is a finepoint of departure for the volume, but this theme is unfortunately not fulfilled inall of the subsequent chapters.
Although different types of data are used in the various contributions to thisvolume, the majority are analyses of online corpora, namely The Bergen Corpusof London Teenage Language (COLT), Sprakkontakt och Ungomdssprak I Norden(UNO), and Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente (COLA). COLT was collected inLondon at the beginning of the 1990s, UNO in the Nordic capitals at the endof the 1990s, and COLA data collection started in Madrid in 2002 but alsoincludes subcorpora from Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile and Guatemala. Theperspective of the editors is clearly that the examination of such large corporais the best way to study youngspeak, and certainly there are advantages to thisapproach; however, in the below discussion of the individual chapters, I will alsopoint out some limitations of this methodology.
The first section of the book is titled ‘Identity construction’, and it is in thissection that the finest contributions can be found. Janet Spreckels’ chapteron German teenage girls shows how they construct their identities as heavymetal enthusiasts by positioning others as inadequate in their knowledge ofrock music. This chapter is a nicely-done analysis of how social identity canemerge through the process of social categorization. Through content as well aslinguistic patterns, gender and age identity come forth along with their identitiesas authentic rock-music fans.
The chapter by Vally Lytra and Taskin Barac is another highpoint of thevolume. This chapter looks at data from Turkish complementary (i.e. weekend)schools in London and shows how code-switching and intertextuality are usedto open up the possibilities for identity construction within the traditional IRF(inititiaton, response, feedback) pattern of classroom discourse.
Also in this section is a chapter by Argiris Archakis and Dimitris Papazachariouon the use of prosody in identity construction in Greek conversationalnarratives. This contribution outlines two interrelated leitmotifs in youngspeak:independence from adults and adult authority, and engagement in culturalpractices which index youth identity and a departure from mainstream normsand values. The analysis is neatly set up to address shifts in discourse andsituated identities through the analysis of prosodic intensity, and shows thatin some cases shifts in speed and volume are used to construct the identitiesof different personas in conversational narratives. The evidence for this is notoverwhelming, however, as only a minority of the speakers employ this pattern;thus, it is presented as a possible resource rather than a common strategy.A more serious problem with this analysis is that, as the authors themselves
admit, there is no clear link between such prosodic patterns and youngspeak inparticular.
Part 2 of the book, ‘Particular expressions’, contains two articles which lookat intensifiers and hedges in Spanish. The first, a contribution on intensifiers byJuan A. Martinez Lopez, examines some interesting data from the Madrid datain COLA, claiming that specific phraseology is the most significant feature of theteenage register. After a discussion of several Spanish intensifiers, the authorincludes some examples of popular phrases among the teens in the corpus,including the borrowing of English flip [out] in the sense of ‘lose control’, whichthe author claims is used in various contexts with a variety of meanings, tothe extent that it ‘lacks a proper meaning’ (p. 92). The author views suchborrowings and extensions of meaning as breaking of grammatical rules, whichis a problematic interpretation given that this process is frequently documentedin language-contact situations (for example, see Haugen 1956). The concludingcomments are based on the assumption ‘that the teenagers are radicalizing theirlinguistic behavior as well as their non-linguistic behavior . . .’ (p. 92). While Ithink this perspective on youngspeak as rebellious talk can be used productively,the path leading to this conclusion is poorly developed, and there is little attemptmade to link this to the putative topic of the chapter, intensifiers.
The second chapter in Part 2, by Annette Myre Jørgensen, looks at hedgeusages of the Spanish phrase en plan, of which there are only 16 tokens. While thedata point to both class- and gender-based variation, no analysis is given for whyhigher-social-class girls would employ this marker more frequently. This maybe, in part, a limitation of the data set; here again the COLA-corpus is used, andwithout ethnographic information about the speakers, such conclusions may bedifficult to generate. Jørgensen does make a claim about how the use – or rather,the relative non-use – of this hedge may be linked to youngspeak, as she discussesthe tendency for teens to see the world in black and white, thus leading to a lackof hedging. While this attempt at an age-group generalization fits nicely withthe spirit of the volume, I find this particular argument unconvincing, especiallyconsidering the well-documented popularity of ‘like’ in hedge/approximationfunctions among English-speaking youths.
The final section of the book, ‘Languages in contrast’, includes four chapterswhich look at different types of comparative research on youngspeak. Thissection is thematically well laid out and each of the chapters presents adifferent perspective on cross-linguistic comparison. The first chapter, by KlausZimmermann, presents an outline of contrastive research of youth languagewithin the Spanish-speaking world. This contribution is purely research designand not research findings, and thus does not serve to answer questions about thistype of comparison; however it does present an example of the issues involvedin the study of the same language across different communities, countries, andcontinents.
In the second chapter of this section, Anna-Brita Stenstrom, using the COLAand COLT corpora, provides an example of a second type of contrastive analysis.
She compares discourse markers with similar functions in Madrid Spanish (puesnada) and London English (anyway). While the analysis is a neat comparison ofthe positions and functions of these two discourse markers, it fails to address howthey are part of youngspeak in particular.
Eli-Marie Drange’s contribution looks at adolescent speakers of Norwegianand Chilean Spanish and how speakers in both groups use Anglicisms; the datashe uses are from the UNO and COLA corpora. This is a promising approach tothe study of youngspeak as it potentially addresses the issue of universality (or atleast generalizations across cultural and linguistic boundaries). Unfortunately,the data base is quite disappointing – there are only 11 different Anglicismsused in each corpus, and most of these are linked to computer-mediatedcommunication (e.g. ‘chat’). Drange points out that the need to name newinventions is not the only motivation for borrowing, however, and claims thatthose Anglicisms borrowed for other functions enter the process of integrationlater than the technical terms. Despite the rather thin empirical evidence for thisclaim, this is a valuable insight about linguistic processes across cultures andlanguages.
The final chapter, by Jolant Legaudaite, looks at slang in the speech of urbanteenagers in Lithuania (Kaunas) and England (London), using a corpus theauthor collected herself called the Corpus of Kaunas Teenage Language (COKT)and COLT. There are two major findings here. First, the teens from Kaunas usemuch more slang than the London teens, which Legaudaite attributes to higher-density networks and a more collectivistic culture. While the latter claim maybe warranted without ethnographic support, the former can only be viewed as apossible explanation, as no information is available about the social networks ofthe speakers in the corpora. The second interesting finding in this research is thatin both settings, boys use more slang than girls. Unfortunately, the discussion ofthese findings is framed with dated references to the ‘two cultures’ approach togender differences, an approach that is not widely embraced by contemporarylanguage and gender scholars (see DeFrancisco and Palczewski 2007: 49; Talbot2003: 474–475).
Overall, this volume provides a much-needed focus on youth language incross-linguistic perspectives, and raises important questions about how age is afactor in language variation. It also raises issues about data and methodologyin studying these topics. In these ways, the research presented here makes avaluable contribution to the study of youth language.
REFERENCES
DeFrancisco, Victoria P. and Catherine H. Palczewski. 2007. Communicating GenderDiversity: A Critical Approach. Los Angeles, California: Sage Publications.
Haugen, Einar. 1956. Bilingualism in the Americas. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Universityof Alabama Press.
Talbot, Mary. 2003. Gender stereotypes: Reproduction and challenge. In Janet Holmesand Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.) The Handbook of Language and Gender. Oxford, U.K.:Blackwell Publishing. 468–486.
JANET M. FULLER
Southern Illinois UniversityDepartment of Anthropology
