Hegemony of English

Donaldo Macedo, Bessie Dendrinos, Panayota Gounari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317258179
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'[P]erhaps the best analysis of the English-only movement in the US and the ramifications worldwide of language policies favouring English ...It displays a dazzling grasp of the many meanings of language and the politics that underlie language policy and educational discourse.' Stanley Aronowitz, City University of New York 'In the present political climate, racism and classism often hide behind seemingly technical issues about English in the modern world. The Hegemony of English courageously unmasks these deceptions and points the way to a more humane and sane way to discuss language in our global world.' James Paul Gee, University of Wisconsin, Madison The Hegemony of English succinctly exposes how the neoliberal ideology of globalization promotes dominating language policies. In the United States and Europe these policies lead to linguistic and cultural discrimination while, worldwide, they aim to stamp out a greater use and participation of national and subordinate languages in world commerce and in international organizations such as the European Union. Democracy calls for broad, multi-ethnic participation, and the authors point us toward more effective approaches in an increasingly interconnected world.

I
The Politics of Intolerance: U.S. Language Policy in Process

THE UNITED STATES HAS HAD NO OVERT OFFICIAL LANGUAGE POLICY regulated by legal and constitutional declaration, yet it is the envy of many nations that aggressively police language use within their borders through explicit policies designed to protect the “purity” and “integrity” of the national language. They are envious that even without a rigid policy, the United States has managed to achieve such a high level of monolingualism and linguistic jingoism that speaking a language other than English constitutes a real liability. American monolingualism is part and parcel of an assimilationist ideology that decimated the American indigenous languages as well as the many languages brought to this shore by various waves of immigrants. As the mainstream culture felt threatened by the presence of multiple languages, which were perceived as competing with English, the reaction by the media, educational institutions, and government agencies was to launch periodic assaults on languages other than English. This was the case with American-Indian languages during the colonial period and German during the first and second world wars.

This covert assimilationist policy in the United States has been so successful in the creation of an ever-increasing linguistic xenophobia that most educators, including critical educators, have either blindly embraced the dominant assimilationist ideology or have remained ambivalent with respect to the worth of languages other than English. The assumption that English is a more viable and pedagogically suitable language than others has completely permeated U.S. educational discourse. Even though the advent of critical pedagogy has produced important debate concerning cultural democracy, social justice, and alternative ways of viewing the world, the question of language is, at best, rarely raised and, at worst, relegated to the margins. With the exception of a handful of critical educators who have taken seriously the role of language in enabling oppressed students to come to subjectivity, most critical educators have failed to engage in rigorous analyses that would unveil the intimate relationship between language, power, and ideology and the ensuing pedagogical consequences. Take, for example, the extensive literature in multicultural education, including critical multiculturalism. These writings usually assume that the valorization of ethnic cultures will take place only in English, of course. This assumption was bluntly interrogated by Donaldo Macedo and Lilia Bartolome when they argued that

although the literature in multicultural education correctly stresses the need to valorize and appreciate cultural differences as a process for students to come to voice, the underlying assumption is that the celebration of other cultures will take place in English only, a language that may provide students from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds with the experience of subordination.¹

Given this pervasive assimilationist culture it is not surprising that even well-intentioned critical educators fall prey to a seemingly laissez-faire language policy. As a result, most educators, including critical educators, not only see nothing wrong with their own monolingualism, they also give their tacit assent, sometimes unknowingly, to the reproduction of the English-only ideology. Conversely, they fail to understand that the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of bilingual education springs from an enormous misconception about the nature and functions of language. Opponents of bilingual education, conservative educators, and advocates of movements that support national and linguistic homogeneity and assimilation, assign to language a mechanistic, technical character. Within this technical perspective, they propose the adoption of English-only instruction as a remedy for the so-called “failure” of linguistic minority students. In addition, they claim that only through the mastery of English will non-English-speaking students be able to participate equally in mainstream society. However, the English-only remedy, or “English for the Children,” as it has euphemistically redefined itself, seems to cure neither the symptom nor the cause of the problem. Reducing the bilingual education debate to technical issues of “teaching language” constitutes an assault on non-English-speaking students’ cultural and ethnic identity, which is inextricably related to their language. It also veils the political and ideological nature of the issue. Viewing bilingual education as merely a technical language issue is, in reality, a complication rather than a simplification of the complex nature of the pedagogies required to address the specific linguistic and cultural needs of linguistic minority students. For language is not simply a technical system, a total of phonemes, morphemes, words and phrases, a code of signs of a particular form that enables members of a linguistic community to communicate. “Simple communication” implies linguistic interaction between humans in given historical, social, and cultural contexts. Humans are not machines or robots that simply produce grammatically correct phrases and exchange codified messages. Their way of communicating not only reflects, but also produces and/or reproduces, specific ideologies, as well as the feelings, values, and beliefs that invariably define their historical and social location. Identity is mapped onto language. In other words, individuals draw from a pool of social practices available to them in order to interpret (written/oral) “texts.” Texts, in turn, as Norman Fairclough notes, “negotiate the sociocultural contradictions … and more loosely ‘differences’ … which are thrown up in social situations, and indeed they constitute a form in which social struggles are acted out.”² Moreover, language is not merely reflective, and, as explained so eloquently by James Donald, educators must understand its productive nature.

I take language to be productive rather than reflective of social reality. This means calling into question the assumptions that we, as speaking subjects, simply use language to organize and express our ideas and experiences. On the contrary, language is one of the most important social practices through which we come to experience ourselves as subjects. My point here is that once we get beyond the idea of language as no more than a medium of communication, as a tool equally available to all parties in cultural exchanges, then we can begin to examine language both as a practice of signification and also as a site for cultural struggle.³

As Donald points out, linguistic functions are not restricted to simple reflection or expression. Language actually shapes human existence in a dual way. For one, it affects the way humans are perceived through their speech. Secondly, individuals develop discourses that are formed through their identity in terms of class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, popular culture, and other factors. Discourses should be understood, according to Fairclough, as “use[s] of language seen as a form of social practice,”⁴ that is, as systems of communication shaped through historical, social, cultural, and ideological practices, which can work to either confirm or deny the life histories and experiences of the people who use them. Recognizing discourse as a social and ideological construct, James Gee defines it as “a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network.’”⁵ In what follows we want to argue that given the social and ideological nature of different functions and uses of language, the proposition that language is neutral or non-ideological constitutes, in reality, an ideological position itself.

Language as Ideology

The non-neutrality of language is very well understood by Jacques Derrida, who argues that even “everyday language is not innocent or neutral. … It carries with it not only a considerable number of presuppositions of all types, but also presuppositions inseparable from metaphysics, which, although little attended to, are knotted into a system.”⁶ We would argue that the “metaphysics” to which Derrida refers can better be understood as ideological nets. Even if the functions of language are reduced to “mere communication,” it still “presupposes subjects (whose identity and presence are constituted before the communication takes place) and objects (signified concepts, a thought meaning) that the passage of communication will have neither to constitute, nor, by all rights, to transform.”⁷

As subjects of our language we possess a particular identity that is always crossed along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth. At the same time, as objects, we are marked by our language in terms of these same categories. In this sense, Pierre Bourdieu argues correctly that linguistic utterances or expressions are forms of practice and, as such, can be understood as the product of the relation between a linguistic habitus (a set of predispositions) and a linguistic market.⁸ Linguistic utterances are produced in particular contexts or markets, and they always involve the speaker’s socialized assessment of the market condition as well as the anticipations of this market. That is, all linguistic expression is a linguistic performance that addresses a particular market. For example, the U.S. linguistic market requires speakers to use so-called standard English, which is a valued and accepted linguistic variety for this particular market. A speaker of nonstandard English, e.g., Ebonics or “Spanglish,” is not an acceptable speaker in the same market to the extent that he or she speaks a variety that is “inappropriate” and devalued by the dominant society. The highly charged debate in Oakland, California, over the recommendation to use Ebonics as a vehicle of instruction among African-American students in the public schools stands as formidable testimony to the power of linguistic hegemony in the U.S. market. Even middle-class African-Americans like Jesse Jackson became vocal adversaries of such pedagogical propositions, indicating the extent to which they have internalized the linguistic and cultural oppression perpetrated against them. Those African-Americans who oppose Ebonics as a viable vehicle of instruction in schools not only reflect a high level of colonization of the mind, but they also reinforce the yoke of the very colonialism that oppresses and represses their language—the most important signpost for cultural identity formation. Once African-Americans allow their minds to be colonized, they are unable to “examine language both as a practice of signification and as a site for cultural struggle—a mechanism which produces antagonistic relations between different social groups.”⁹

Linguistic oppression is not necessarily restricted to speakers of nonstandard varieties. An alleged speaker of standard English who, for example, has not received formal education may turn out to be a nonacceptable speaker at certain levels of linguistic interaction (e.g., at a corporate board meeting or in academia). Bourdieu illustrates this point by saying that individuals from upper-class backgrounds are endowed with a linguistic habitustied to a specific kind of cultural capital—that enables them to respond with relative ease to the demands of most formal or official occasions. This includes obviously the school curriculum. On the other hand, he adds, “Individuals from petit-bourgeois backgrounds must generally make an effort to adapt their linguistic expressions to the demands of formal markets. The result is that their speech is often accompanied by tension and anxiety, and by a tendency to rectify or correct expressions so that they concur with dominant norms.”¹⁰

The notion of “habitus” can also be understood as a form of “apprenticeship, that is, socially learned discourse and behavior that can either deny or affirm access to particular social and cultural practices. Individuals who have been apprenticed through particular discourses to approach the dominant “norm” become competent speakers of the standard, while members who develop discourses that diverge from the “norm” are perceived as speaking nonstandard varieties. In either case, whenever language is present, an invisible but omnipresent evaluation system is put into play. Therefore, the set of predispositions—namely the cultural capital (as different forms of cultural knowledge, including language knowledge) that shapes one’s discourse—differs among individuals. Through linguistic interaction, evaluation functions not only to measure an individual’s “value”—in terms of what the language actually “says” about the speaker—but also classifies individuals into preconceived groups identified as speaking nonacceptable languages for the respective markets. As a result, language evaluation is an inherent mechanism that is often used to dominate other groups culturally. This mechanism was used effectively by the colonial powers, and its legacy remains anchored in the current language policies of former colonial possessions, particularly in Africa, where the official languages with more currency are always the colonial languages. In some real sense, the language policy in the United States functions as a form of internal colonialism. Hence, even if non-English-speaking students are able to meet the needs of the U.S. linguistic market (in terms of mastering enough English to “simply communicate,” as the proponents of English-only suggest), they will still be identified as the “other.” Their language will always be marked by their color, race, ethnicity, and class and constructed within a politics of identity that situates subjects within an assimilation grid. Generally, groups of speakers who are typecast via the devaluation of their language tend to resort to resistance by protecting their only tools of opposing domination, namely language and culture. In short, their language will always be marked by their otherness, both in terms of ways they are perceived and the ways they see the world ideologically. Thus, it becomes obvious that the issue at hand is not language, but the right to be different in a supposed cultural democracy. Or as Fairclough accurately notes, “the problematic of language and power is fundamentally a question of democracy.”¹¹ However, the issue here is not simply to acknowledge cultural diversity. As Homi Bhabha reminds us, cultural difference—as opposed to cultural diversity¹²—should be understood as

the awareness that first of all you have the problem of difference, not because there are many preconstituted cultures. … Cultural difference is a particular constructed discourse at a time when something is being challenged about power or authority. At that point, a particular cultural trait or tradition … becomes the site of contestation, abuse, insult, and discrimination. Cultural difference is not the natural emanation of the fact that there are different cultures in the world. It’s a much more problematic and sophisticated reproduction of a ritual, a habit, a trait, a characteristic …

The question of cultural difference is not the problem of there being diverse cultures and that diversity produces the difference. It is that each time you want to make a judgment about a culture or about a certain element within a certain culture in the context of some kind of social and political condition that puts pressure on that judgment, you are standing at that point in this disjunctive difference-making site.

Through the proposition that the English language is a passport which gives access to the higher cultural, political, and economic echelons of U.S. society, opponents of bilingual education attempt to hide their ongoing cultural invasion of other groups. Learning standard English will not iron out social stratification, racism, and xenophobia. Nevertheless, under the “naivete” pretext and the notion that language exists in a vacuum, conservative educators continue to disarticulate language from its social and ideological context by conveniently ignoring the following facts:

First, meaning carried by language can never be analyzed in an isolated fashion. Meaning is always historically constructed, and it is a phenomenon of culture, a product of culture that is inherently ideological and, thus, political. Furthermore, as everything ideological possesses meaning, every sign—as a form of meaning—is also ideological. Following this line of argument, access to meaning must invariably involve a process whereby the reading of the world must precede the reading of the word. That is to say, to access the meaning of an entity, we must understand the cultural practices that mediate our access to the world semantic field and its interaction with the words’ semantic features.

Second, language cannot exist apart from its speakers. The transition from the Sassurean “langue” to “parole” is possible only through the mediation of humans as agents of history who actively participate in the formation and transformation of their world. Human communication is unique; human language is “species-specific” and cannot simply exist in a form of abstract signs. It is humans that give meaning to the signs, where the signifier becomes the signified. Language cannot exist as an autonomous code, detached from its speakers and contexts. By neglecting the role of the speaker in his/her cultural, political, and ideological location and by ignoring the context in which communication takes place (the parameters set in the linguistic market), we fail ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• CHAPTER I The Politics of Intolerance: U.S. Language Policy in Process
• CHAPTER II European Discourses of Homogenization in the Discourse of Language Planning
• CHAPTER III The Colonialism of English-Only
• CHAPTER IV Linguoracism in European Foreign Language Education Discourse
• CHAPTER V Reclaiming the Language of Possibility: Beyond the Cynicism of Neoliberalism
• Notes
• About the Authors
• Index