Hello, my name is Kathryn Woolard and I'm a Professor Emerita of linguistic anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. I'm going to talk about language ideologies. These are cultural constructions and representations of the way that language is structured and used in a social world. These ideas are very often taken for granted as simply common sense. Because they often are unrecognized, this means that such ideas can create unintended consequences for language revitalization efforts. For example, an indigenous language revival program in Canada brought Kaska speaking elders into primary schools to model the language for children, precisely because elders are traditionally highly respected in the Kaska speaking community. But because of this respect for the authority of elders, the kids got the idea that they should not speak Kaska. They thought it belong to elders and that they would have to wait until they grew older and wiser and grew into the language. This example points to the question of the foundations of linguistic authority. Who is authorized to speak, and what language will people really listen to? There are two common ideologies of linguistic authority that we call authenticity and anonymity. The ideology of authenticity values a language because it's taken to express the true experience and the true nature of a group or community or other speaker. It's authentically theirs, it belongs to them. Authenticity is the principle value assigned to many and probably most minorities languages in the world today. In contrast, anonymity represents a language as available to many and to everyone: it is not belonging to any particular community or limited to any particular place. It's just speech. English is an example of a language that is valued both in the United States and now globally for its' alleged anonymity. Both of these forms of linguistic authority rest at a more fundamental ideology of linguistic naturalism. This is the idea that languages are shaped by forces of nature, that their natural objects beyond the willful control of human actors and speakers. You can probably start to see some of the issues that these ideologies can raise for revitalization efforts. First, linguistic naturalism itself constraints any kind of intervention in general. It discredits efforts to strengthen or to expand minoritized languages, disdaining these as artificial or as going against the true nature of spontaneous language. I suspect you might be able to think of some examples of this kind of discourse that discredits deliberate efforts of revitalization. Then anonymity means that it's usually just assumed that the dominant language in a multilingual society will simply always be better for public use; than languages whose value rests on their authenticity. So that the other languages, the authentic languages, are likely to be seen as fine in their limited local range or for private or home use, but not for general and objective communication. Here again, I would ask if you can think of pairs of languages that are contrasted in this way in your experience and are valued and devalued in this way. Authenticity itself is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it encourages speakers to hold onto threatened linguistic varieties as their very own. But on the other hand, it's limiting if you want to expand such languages use. First because using a language for general communication among a broader, more anonymous public may make it feel less authentic as if it was being sold out or made artificial. Secondly, authenticity can make it hard to recruit new speakers. For example, in Catalonia, where I do my research, before Catalan became the common medium of schooling, Castilian speakers, who are a large part of the population, often felt inhibited about speaking Catalan because it seemed like it was advancing a claim to a authentic Catalan identity that wasn't theirs. Third, there are reports that heritage language speakers often feel ashamed if they have to deliberately study to master what they think should naturally be their authentic language and what they believe other people expect to come naturally to them. That's been reported in many places, for example, among adult learners of Corsican in Corsica, and also among younger English dominant Latino students and Spanish Language Heritage Programs in the United States for example. You might ask, are there alternative ideological foundations of linguistic authority? You might be able to think of some, for example, languages whose value is based in their association with the divine, with the Word of God or a belief that working hard on learning a heritage language is actually a sacred duty rather than a shameful task. This has been reported for Hawaiian and it aids in Hawaiian revival program. Can language ideologies be challenged? Can they be changed? Again, I would say yes. You might think about what your own experience shows. In our current neoliberal, late modern age, the emphasis on the do it yourself individual has actually created quite a few opportunities to challenge linguistic naturalism and to challenge the idea that, that language you are born to, defines who you really are forever. I have seen this kind of change among speakers of Catalan in Catalonia, for example. Challenging dominant ideologies means constantly questioning and excavating ideas about language in life that people may not even realize that they have and that they are trading on. So to do that, it's necessary to listen very carefully and to look hard at the implicit meanings in the representations of language that surround us everywhere, in every day life.
