April 9 readings

One of the notions that Farr and Song discussed was the “close alignment of an ideology of standardization with an ideology of monolingualism, as exemplified in both England and France” (652). Although I’ve learned about these ideologies, the connection hadn’t been explicitly stated until I read the article. There’s a lot of implications that the connection implied, both positive and negative. One of the positive implications is that the standardization of a language means there could be one language that a group of people can rally behind and could identify themselves with. It also means that there’d be less confusion in what language a society would use for official, educational and economic matters. However, there also negative connotations. One of the negative implication is that “the pairing of nationalization and language standardization yielded an ‘ideology of contempt’ toward minority languages and dialects, which turn contributed to the disappearance of ‘small languages’ worldwide” (652). For example, some of the younger generation such as students wouldn’t see the point in learning any of the other languages that the country has since they won’t be used in the society anyway—some of them wouldn’t see the value of learning another language. The Welsh language, for example, in UK wasn’t being used until the educational system forced the students to learn it. However, even with this process, the some students feel hostile at learning a language that they won’t even use even if it was their heritage language. Another negative implication that the connection carries is that there’s no room for appropriating a standardized language by a previously existing language (such as AAVE). Vernacular usage and code-switching are seen as diluting a language and people who have appropriated the language can’t find a corner for themselves in the society or find themselves suddenly without a voice. This is especially captured by Herder who said “by making language seem faceless, decontextualized, abstract, and socially and historically disembodied, practices of purification could imagine Others by virtue of their…failure to speak this language of the modern subject” (652). Minority languages thus become the abject of a society that advocates in monolingualism; it becomes something that taints the standardized language. Instead, it is transformed into an unincorporated cultural body.

However, Farr, Song, McKay and Bokhorst-Heng also stress the fact that not all societies believe in monolingualism; that more and more, local agents recognize the importance of and the need for bilingualism. There are some societies that advocate in bilingualism even though they stress the importance of having a national language, that “when local agents negotiate or challenge the hegemony of language policies in their interpretation and implementation of them, they contest the ideologies that underlie the language policies, and they acknowledge the sociolingustic reality of language use within multilingual contexts, including classrooms. In such contexts actual linguistic practices involve the creative and emergent mixing of different languages and dialects, and sometimes these mixtures become named languages themselves” (656). For example, McKay and Bokhorst-Heng illustrated how “the majority of Singaporeans use multiple language varieties in their everyday lives, depending on the particular age and educational qualifications of the persons involved, the situation, and the topic” (94). The linguistic ecology, the varieties of languages in Singapore, creates an atmosphere in which English is appropriated into a completely different language: Singapore English. And this language is not at all devalued. Instead, it acquires importance in certain domains.