The Internet, new media and social media have become a way of life for many Canadians. These new forms of communication are affecting the lives of Anglophone and Francophone Canadians, who are using them in many areas. These new tools are both instant and accessible. The use of these new technologies is spreading quickly, but are Canadiansâ language rights being respected? (Canadian Standing Senate Committee 2012)
In 2011, the Canadian Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages undertook a study of Internet use and social media in Canada and observed that although the Internet and new and social media present opportunities for the French language (e.g. web initiatives to promote French and those who speak it), the Internet remains English-dominant (Senate Committee 2012: 102). Notably, the report stressed the need to expand the presence of French in the digital world (Senate Committee 2012: 103). While recommendations focussed primarily on the potential for action within the government and civil service, the Committee also stressed the importance of the private sector and the significant role of financial incentives in encouraging growth (Senate Committee 2012: 103).
Such recommendations allude to the powers of the nation-state and their role-effecting change in language issues. Although the Canadian government has been widely successful in effecting linguistic change in offline environments, the media have consistently posed challenges to the Canadian nation-state model. In particular, the emergence of new and social media that are transnational and âsuperdiverseâ raises questions about the extent to which a government can continue to enforce language policiesâand thus protect language rightsâin an increasingly mediatised world. Moreover, viral news stories that present specific languages and language groups in a negative light indicate that the presence of a language in online spaces is not always the issue; rather, the issue is sometimes the extent to which explicit or implicit representations of these languages and speakers contribute to discourses aboutâand the uptake ofâlanguage policies.
Viral news stories that focus on languages and language groups highlight the provocative nature of language issues in Canadaâand in particular official language issues. Although English and French are both the official languages of the country, they are not spoken in equal numbers from coast to coast, nor do they share a history of equality. While open debates about the two languages are not everyday affairs, beliefs about the two languages are embedded and naturalised in day-to-day life in Canada; they arguably underpin Canadiansâ very understanding of the country and, to some extent, their place within it. News stories, online commentary, and social media data can show how beliefs about languages become manifested and openly contested, but examinations of large-scale data sets can also show us the more mundane ways in which language ideologies are part of everyday Canadian discourse.
The theoretical framework of âlanguage ideologiesâ is useful for explaining how language, identity, nationhood, and the state become interconnected in the social imaginary and represented in discourse. If beliefs about languagesâor language ideologiesâdiffer between French speakers and English speakers, then debates over the countryâs official languages may be inevitable. Moreover, since the vast majority (83 %) of Canadians are not fluent in both official languages (Statistics Canada 2011), most English and French speakers do not have full access to alternative perspectives voiced in the other language. Thus, if different language ideologies circulate within linguistic communities, then these may perpetuate the historic isolation of and misunderstandings between English- and French-speaking Canadians. It is the objective of this book to examine and compare language ideologies in English and French media data in order to identify how they contribute to language policymaking and the adoption of language policies on the ground.
This introductory chapter supplies some of the ideas presented in this book by exploring the role of language ideologies in the media. It begins by outlining previous research on language ideologies before turning to their study in news media. Although there has been less research on language ideologies in new and social media, an overview of scholarship in this emerging field will be provided. Having reviewed the state-of-the-art, the chapter will then turn to the research questions guiding the book, before concluding with an overview of the chapters.
1.1 An Introduction to Language Ideologies and the Media
Although the use of languages in media is certainly important for respecting language rights, there is also the question of
how languages are being used, by whom, and for what purposes. More specifically, it is crucial to understand how languages are being representedâor misrepresentedâin different media because such representations can have implications for the uptake of language policies and, thus, the respect of language rights. Even though representations of languages can be explicit (e.g. âEnglish is practicalâ; âFrench is romanticâ), they can also be implicit and take shape in incremental, banal ways. Whether explicit or implicit, representations of languages tend to be based on fundamental beliefs about and understandings of languages ingrained in a society and taken to be commonsense. In this book, such beliefs and understandings about languages are referred to as âlanguage ideologiesâ (Woolard
1998). These are:
Set[s] of beliefs on languages or a particular language shared by members of a community [âŠ] These beliefs come to be so well established that their origin is often forgotten by speakers, and are therefore socially reproduced and end up being ânaturalizedâ, or perceived as natural or as common sense, thereby masking the social construction processes at work. (Boudreau and Dubois 2007: 104)
Language ideologies include understandings of the role language does or should play in society, and these may involve beliefs about the kind or variety of language that is or should be spoken in (certain sectors of) society.
Language ideologies have been a topic of research for linguists since the 1970s (e.g. Silverstein 1979) and were largely defined by the publication of the edited collection Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (Schieffelin et al. 1998). However, not all research that concerns beliefs about language in society has used the term âlanguage ideologyâ. For example, research on language attitudes, motivation, folk linguistics, language planning, prestige, standards, aesthetics, and language awareness all deal to a certain extent with beliefs about language (see Ager 2001; Coupland and Jaworski 2004: 23; Preston 2002; Ricento 2005; Ruiz 1984; Woolard 1998: 4). Talk about language, or âmetalanguageâ, tends to express these beliefs, and metalanguage is studied across various disciplines (Kelly-Holmes and Milani 2011: 468). Jaworski et al. (2004a: 4) describe metalanguage in terms of what are often evaluative understandings and beliefs, referring to â[l]anguage in the context of linguistic representations and evaluationsâ. Metalanguage may involve expressions of how language works, what it is normally like, what various ways of speaking may imply or connote, and what language ought to be like (Jaworski et al. 2004b: 3; Silverstein 1998: 136; Spitulnik 1998: 163). When metalanguage is used to make sense of the âreality of languageâ, it tends to become ideological (Jaworski et al. 2004b: 3; Preston 2004: 87â89). However, since beliefs about and understandings of languages are not always explicitly stated (i.e. with metalanguage), the language ideologies framework is preferred here (cf. Johnson and Ensslin 2007: 7).
According to Woolard (1998: 3), language ideologies are â[r]epresentations, whether explicit or implicit, that construe the intersection of language and human beings in a social worldâ (emphasis added). Language ideologies may be implicit if, for example, they are naturalised and do not require articulation, or they may become explicit in âlinguistic representationsâ (e.g. Boudreau 2008) or âlanguage ideological debatesâ (Blommaert 1999a). Thus, â[i]deology is variously discovered in linguistic practice itself; in explicit talk about language, that is, metalinguistic or metapragmatic discourse; and in the regimentation of language use through more implicit metapragmaticsâ (Woolard 1998: 9). Language ideologies may concern linkages between such diverse categories as spelling and grammar with other categories such as nation, gender, authenticity, knowledge, power, and tradition. The linkages between language (or language features) and social categories are the result of what Silverstein (2003) calls the âorders of indexicalityâ. Indexicality involves signs that either naturally or as a result of social construction point to some property common to a group (Squires 2010: 459). However, the orders of indexicality, as used by Silverstein, focus specifically on linguistic features and how strata of social meanings come to be indexed by these linguistic features: ââindexical orderâ is the concept necessary to showing us how to relate the micro-social to the macro-social frames of analysis of any sociolinguistic phenomenonâ (Silverstein 2003: 193).
When a feature is noticed and correlated with a specific speech community, this is the first-order index (what Silverstein calls the nth order). When this order becomes metapragmatically linked to an entire speech group, this is a second-order index (what Silverstein calls the nth + 1 order). When these features are âobjectified a...
