the language to die out. Thus the purist ideology, while not altogether absent in the discourse of these youths, was challenged.
Monoglossic ideologies
The final type of ideology we will discuss here is what are called monoglossic ideologies, which value monolingualism over multilingualism. We refer to this in the plural as there are different monoglossic ideologies – ‘the one nation–one language’ ideology, for example, which demands strict indexicality between a language and a nation. Monoglossic ideologies may also include purist attitudes about borrowing (i.e., that the language should remain ‘pure’ from the influence of other languages). Monoglossic ideologies stigmatize language mixing, a topic we will return to in chapter 8.
Again, it is important to note that while hegemonic ideologies – for example the ideology that national belonging is indexed through the national language – do exist, this hegemony may be challenged. In a study about Ukrainian language ideologies Seals (2019) notes that some young Ukrainians in her study claimed that ‘it doesn’t matter what you speak,’ and argued that speaking Russian did not make you less Ukrainian. This challenge to the monoglossic ideology of ‘one nation–one language’ illustrates another aspect of hegemony: although it can be challenged, the challenges must recognize (and thus reproduce) the hegemonic ideology. The protest that the link between the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian identity is not absolute must also acknowledge the pervasive ideology of an indexical relationship between language and national identity.
Exploration 3.3 Slang
Look at the definitions for ‘slang’ provided on Urban Dictionary, an online dictionary providing definitions posted by users. (Ignore those that have nothing to do with language use; this word can also be used to mean sex, drug dealing, and the past tense of sling by some speakers.) What are the ideologies about slang that appear in this forum? To what extent are they about language (and, often, language decay) and to what extent are they about the groups of people associated with the use of slang?
Iconicity, erasure, and recursivity
A framework for the study of language ideologies was proposed by Gal and Irvine (1995) in which they outline the concepts of iconicity, erasure, and recursivity. The relationship between language and social groups is seen as iconic: language does not just index a social group (as discussed in the last chapter) but is perceived as sharing features with it. For example, in Dickinson’s (2010) research in the Zakarpattia region, she notes that although this region was recognized as part of the Ukraine, it was also viewed as a wild and foreign ‘other.’ Descriptions of the dialect of this region by outsiders always included reference to indecipherable words for everyday objects, and in this way the ‘otherness’ of the language depicted the ‘otherness’ of the people.
Erasure occurs when certain information about languages is ignored in order to support a particular ideology. An interesting example of this is provided by Alfaraz (2018) in a study of language ideologies in the Cuban diaspora. She found that while Cuban Spanish had high prestige in the diaspora, Spanish spoken in Cuba was stigmatized. The study showed that the participants could not actually distinguish between the two varieties but assumed that speakers using nonstandard features were from Cuba. Further, if they were told that speakers were from Cuba and not the diaspora, they rated these voices as less standard, regardless of the actual features which were used in the sample. Thus, the linguistic reality was entirely erased by these speakers; they ignored the linguistic features and assumed standardized speech for the diaspora speakers. This erasure allowed them to maintain the ideology of the superiority of the Spanish spoken in the diaspora over that spoken in Cuba.
Finally, relationships between languages are recursive, meaning that they are repeated on different linguistic levels. For example, the hierarchical relationship between English and indigenous and immigrant languages in the US is replicated between dialects. That is, while English is seen as superior to other languages (supported by a monoglossic ideology), the standard language ideology reinforces this same hierarchical order with English varieties. Thus the standard – that is, some idealized standardized variety of English – is seen as superior to regional, ethnic, or social‐class varieties.
Language attitudes
As mentioned above, the study of language attitudes overlaps with the study of language ideologies; both look at how people feel about languages, with language ideology research focusing more on larger societal discourses. The methodologies used to look at these phenomena are part of how we categorize research as being on ideologies or attitudes. This is not a clear distinction, however; although the analysis of discourse has traditionally led to research which talks about ideologies, Liebscher and Dailey‐O’Cain (2017) advocate interactional data in the study of language attitudes.
In this section we will focus on experimental methods more traditionally associated with attitude research. One of the issues involved in research methodology is whether the research participants reveal conscious or explicit language attitudes, or if the task seeks to elicit subconscious or implicit attitudes (see Rosseel and Grondelaers 2019; Pharao and Kristiansen 2019 for an in‐depth discussion of the complexity of these distinctions). While of course it is possible to directly ask research participants what they think of different ways of speaking, in surveys or interviews, a number of other methods have been devised to get at what have been called subconscious or implicit attitudes about language and their users. In the next section, we will discuss a method involving the use of maps to elicit descriptions and evaluations of regional varieties which is called perceptual dialectology. In the subsequent sections, we will also discuss a well‐known indirect method of studying language attitudes, called matched guise or verbal guise technique, and the more recently developed implicit association test.
Perceptual dialectology
The study of nonlinguists’ ideas about the regions, features, and values of dialects has come to be called perceptual dialectology (Preston 1989, 1999, 2002a, 2002b; Niedzielski and Preston 1999; Long and Preston 2003). The methodology employed by Preston in his work involved giving people maps of the United States and asking them first to draw dialect regions, and then to label the dialects and describe them in terms of both correctness and pleasantness. What emerges from such work is an understanding of the attitudes people have about the ways of speaking associated with particular regions. It also reveals stereotypes concerning people who live in these regions. Among various interesting findings in these studies we see that speakers may not rate their own dialect highly, and that many dialects (including the speakers’ own) are sometimes rated highly for pleasantness but as lacking in correctness, or vice versa. For instance, the findings in Preston (1999) show that respondents from Michigan consistently rated their own dialect as correct, and perpetuated the stereotype of southerners as speaking incorrect English. However, the Michiganders often rated southern speech as pleasant and friendly (often more friendly than their own regional variety).
One of the interesting findings in some research in perceptual dialectology is that regional differences are often intertwined with ideas about other social groups. For instance, Bucholtz et al. (2007) found in a study done among University of California–Santa Barbara students about perceptions of language in the state of California that although the southern California/northern California divide was prominent for most of the respondents, and stereotypes about the English spoken in these regions abounded, often other factors emerged as significant as well. Speakers of Spanish (mostly referred to as ‘Mexicans’) were often associated with Los Angeles and San Diego, and speakers of Chinese with the Bay Area. There were also certain areas associated with speakers of AAVE (the Bay Area and Compton, a largely African American suburb of Los Angeles),
